WHAT BOOKS PRESENTS ANNETTE LEDDY, GAIL WRONSKY, and CHUCK ROSENTHAL

Please join us for a special night with three authors from one of our favorite local presses, What Books Press. 

Earth Still

Playful and slyly original, Earth Still tells the story of Patricia, a museum curator and the mother of a young son, who falls for a new neighbor, Rennie, in the aftermath of an alien spaceship’s unexplained landing in present day Los Angeles. The presence of the ship, along with the apparent absence of a pilot, precipitates a social crisis, while Patricia’s affair with the mysterious Rennie creates its own tensions. Referencing art house film directors Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, Italian Futurist writer F.T. Marinetti, and classic science fiction movies, Earth Still is a transfiguring love story, a meditation on the interrelationship of science fiction and visual art, and a riveting fantasy about our obsession with aliens.

Annette Leddy is a writer, critic, and curator. In 2009 she was awarded an arts writer grant from the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Foundation and in 2013 was a resident at Montalvo Center for the Arts. Currently she is the New York Collector for the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Leddy’s fiction has appeared in Quarterly West and Quarry. Four of her short stories were performed as part of the New Short Fiction series in Los Angeles. She lives in Brooklyn.

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The Shortest Farewells Are the Best

"The Shortest Farewells Are the Best is a clever and hilarious tour de force. With lines culled from dozens of noir films ranging from the famous to the obscure, Chuck Rosenthal and Gail Wronsky have fashioned a brilliant literary collage that is as entertaining as it is thought provoking. I haven’t the foggiest notion of how they came up with the idea for this book, but I’m certainly glad their off-kilter muse paid them a visit."—Tom Hazuka, editor of Flash Fiction Funny 

"Never was there a world where people talked like that—precise, salty, bracingly honest—and maybe that’s darn too bad. Meanwhile, we can console ourselves with Chuck Rosenthal and Gail Wronsky’s poems composed of come-ons, smack-downs, threats and enticements spoken by actual B-movie actors. These might read like madhouse non sequitors, but crazy funny, or they might resolve themselves into conversations that seem to make darkly paradoxal sense. The wicked fun the two have with this 40s and 50s dialogue proves what some of us have always suspected, Noir is Poetry’s evil twin. Evil, that is, in a good way."—Suzanne Lummis, author of the poetry collection Open 24 Hours

Gail Wronsky is the author of Poems for Infidels, Dying for Beauty, a finalist for the Western Arts Federation Poetry Award,The Love-talkers, Again the Gemini are in the Orchard, and Dogland. Her translation of Alicia Partnoy's poems Volando Bajito has been published by Red Hen, and she is the coauthor with Molly Bendall of two books of "cowgirl" poetry: Calamity and Belle, A Cowgirl Correspondence and Dear Calamity, Love Belle. Blue Shadow Behind Everything Dazzling, a chapbook of poems about India where she lived for several months in 2006, has been published by Hollyridge Press.
 
Chuck Rosenthal is the author of eight novels:  the Loop Trilogy: Loop’s Progress, Experiments with Life and Deaf, andLoop’s End; Elena of the Stars; Avatar Angel, the Last Novel of Jack Kerouac; My Mistress Humanity; The Heart of Mars; and the current Coyote O’Donohughe’s History of Texas.  He has published a memoir, Never Let Me Go, and most recently a travel book, Are We Not There Yet? Travels in Nepal, North India, and Bhutan.  In the fall of 2012 he published his second book of Magic Journalism, West of Eden: A Life in 21st Century Los Angeles. His novel Ten Thousand Heavens was published in 2013 by Whitepoint Press.