For Immediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong(a)yahoo.com
Mel Bosworth and Ryan Ridge at City Art
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday November 7th, 7:00—9:00P.M.
Ryan Ridge andMell Bosworth will read from their book WeirdWeeks November 7th at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 7:00 P.M. aspart of the City Art Reading Series.
Ryan Ridge author of twochapbooks and four books, including the hybrid novel, American Homes (Universityof Michigan Press, 2015), which was The Michigan Library Publishing Club’sinaugural book club pick. His work has appeared in Tin House FlashFridays, Mississippi Review, Potomac Review, LosAngeles Review, Lumina, Salt Hill, SantaMonica Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. In 2016,Ridge received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction judged byJonathan Lethem. His next book, Weird Weeks, a chapbook cowrittenwith Mel Bosworth, won the Editors’ Prize from The Cupboard Pamphlet andwill be published in the fall of 2018. He's an assistant professor at WeberState University and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. He edits the literarymagazine Juked.
Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight, the poetrychapbook Every Laundromat in the World, and co-author with RyanRidge of Second Acts in American Lives. His work hasappeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Per Contra, New WorldWriting, Santa Monica Review, Melville House, American Book Review,and elsewhere. A former series editor for the Wigleaf Top 50 anda former assistant editor for The Best Small Fictions, Melcurates the Small Press Book Review, an online archive. Helives in Western Massachusetts.
Here’s a bit about the book that’s coming out in earlyNovember:
PRAISE FOR WEIRD WEEKS
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfectweird book in Weird Weeks. Are these dreams? Fantasias? Postcardsfrom a parallel universe? It doesn’t matter, because they’re so absorbing andfunny and sad and good they deserve to just exist without category, to be readwithout anything but delight.”
—Amber Sparks author of The Unfinished World
“It seems like every week nowadays is a weird week, but not goodweird. These pieces are good weird-–eccentric and surreal and ready toturn on a dime or even on a penny, funny and insane, but with a deep andsometimes grim human core.”
—Brian Evenson author of A Collapse ofHorses
“Weird Weeks is another wild powerful duet albumfrom Ridge and Bosworth, two flash fiction American masters. Each story howlswith life and laughter. A sucker punch right to the heart. With echoes of JamesTate, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino, Weird Weeks risesto the occasion of our strange times and leaves the reader breathlessly alive.A full-tilt joyride for the soul, wonderfully weird and dangerously beautiful.”
—Michael Bible author of Sophia and Empireof Light
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth’s collection of coordinated tandemshenanigans, Weird Weeks, provides its reader with aseries of dispatches from a realm so absurd it rivals our own. In an era whenit’s easy to confuse satire for reality, The Onion for TheWashington Post, we need a book like this one to put things in perspective,to give us a way to laugh at ourselves while absorbing the gut punch of howstrange our lives can seem when seen through the twin lenses of two vibrantimaginations.”
-–Christopher Kennedy author of Clues fromthe Animal Kingdom
Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Artis sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City PublicLibrary, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.
Joel Long
