I’ll be reading from French fabulist Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s story “An Occasional Icarus†tonight at San Francisco’s Haight favorite, indie darling The Booksmith. The event starts at 7:30, and the illustrious lineup includes Anthony “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena†Marra, Karen Tei “Tropic of Orange†Yamashita, and Zachary “The Lost Books of the Odyssey†Mason, who along with Châteaureynaud and forty-six other writers have stories in Kate Bernheimer’s latest anthology, XO Orpheus. This follow-up to the World Fantasy Award-winning My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (which tackled fairy tales) gives timeless myths a modern day spin.
“An Occasional Icarus†is Châteaureynaud’s fifth story to appear in English since the 2010 collection A Life on Paper from Small Beer Press. It was originally published as a chapbook in 2006 by the small French press Les Éditions du Chemin de Fer, in an imprint pairing single stories by noted short story writers with illustrators.
Some of Frédéric Arditi’s illustrations for Châteaureynaud’s “Les Intermittences d’Icare†can be seen above. The story will be collected this coming fall in the author’s latest book from his longtime publisher Grasset, his eighth full-length story collection: tentatively, whimsically entitled Young Codger on a Wooden Rock.
Come join us! Tonight, you can be a Haight-er.
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