March 2013 Conversations with Las Comadres: Teleconference Series
Ink — Outside Links: Book Author Publisher
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW Length: 00:57:33 | Size: 10.36 MB
March 2013 Book of the Month
Ink
By Sabrina Vourvoulias
Published by Crossed Genres Publications
ISBN-13: 978-0615657813
What happens when rhetoric about immigrants escalates to an institutionalized population control system? The near-future, dark speculative novel Ink opens as a biometric tattoo is approved for use to mark temporary workers, permanent residents and citizens with recent immigration history—collectively known as inks.
Set in a fictional city and small, rural town in the U.S. during a 10-year span, the novel is told in four voices: a journalist; an ink who works in a local population control office; an artist strongly tied to a specific piece of land; and a teenager whose mother runs an inkatorium (a sanitarium-internment center opened in response to public health concerns about inks).
The main characters grapple with ever-changing definitions of power, home and community; relationships that expand and complicate their lives; personal magicks they don t fully understand; and perceptions of otherness based on ethnicity, language, class and inclusion. In this world, the protagonists magicks serve and fail, as do all other systems—government, gang, religious organization—until only two things alone stand: love and memory.
About the Author: Sabrina Vourvoulias
Sabrina Vourvoulias was born in Bangkok, Thailand—the daughter of a Mexican-Guatemalan visual artist and an American businessman. She grew up in Guatemala and moved to the United States when she was fifteen.
Her poetry has appeared in Dappled Things, Graham House Review, Scheherezade’s Bequest at Cabinet des Fées, La Bloga’s Floricanto, Poets Responding to SB 1070, and upcoming in Bull Spec; her fiction in Crossed Genres Issue 24, and in the Crossed Genres Year Two and Fat Girl in a Strange Land anthologies, and upcoming in Strange Horizons, GUD magazine and the anthology Menial: Skilled Labor in SF. Her novel, Ink was released by Crossed Genres Publications October 15, 2012, and was named to Latinidad’s “Best Books of 2012” list in December.
Her blog Following the Lede was nominated for a Latinos in Social Media (LATISM) award in 2011.
March 2013 Additional Conversation
The Miniature Wife and Other Stories
By Manuel Gonzales
Published by Riverhead
ISBN-13: 978-1594486043
The eighteen stories of Manuel Gonzales’s exhilarating first book render the fantastic commonplace and the ordinary extraordinary, in prose that thrums with energy and shimmers with beauty. In The Artist’s Voice, we meet one of the world’s foremost composers, a man who speaks through his ears.
A hijacked plane circles a city for twenty years in Pilot, Copilot, Writer. Sound can kill in The Sounds of Early Morning. And, in the title story, a man is at war with the wife he accidentally shrank. For these characters, the phenomenal isn’t necessarily special—but it’s often dangerous.
In slightly fantastical settings, Gonzales illustrates very real guilt over small and large marital missteps, the intense desire for the reinvention of self, and the powerful urges we feel to defend and provide for the people we love. With wit and insight, these stories subvert our expectations and challenge us to look at our surroundings with fresh eyes. Brilliantly conceived, strikingly original, and told with the narrative instinct of a born storyteller, The Miniature Wife is an unforgettable debut.
About the Author: Manuel Gonzales
Manuel Gonzales is a graduate of the Columbia University graduate creative writing program. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Open City, Fence, One Story, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and The Believer. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two children.