I’ll be reading at AAWW’s Page Turner fest this Saturday

Three writers read metafictional, adventurous books whose prose is as experimental and fractured as their main characters’ identities. Brooklyn Public Defender Sergio de la Pava originally published his “unapologetically maximalist” novel A Naked Singularity (Slate), a novel seemingly too ambitious and eclectic for mainstream publishing. The book was picked up by the University of Chicago, won a PEN Literary Award, and earned comparisons to Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and Melville. The 678-page hysterical tome follows a public defender who’s the child of Colombian immigrants, as he takes readers through a tour of crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight. What would happen if you threw 150 years of the Philippines into the blender with Oscar Wao and Tristram Shandy? Possibly something like Miguel Syjuco’s Man Asian Award-winning novel Illustrado, which combines poetry, reviews, interviews, polemics, unreliable narration, and a main character whose name is—surprise, surprise—Miguel Syjuco. Eugene Lim’s layered, pixelated novel The Strangerscollects a “literary cabinet of curiosities,” in the words of The Paris Review, including a young man vandalizing the posters of a paranoid nation, the search for the perfect T-shirt, and the missing person’s bureau of a giant cruise ship. Moderated by Ira Silverberg, former Editor-in-Chief of Grove Atlantic and NEA Literature Director.

http://pageturnerfest.org/