Join us on Thursday, January 5 at 7pm PT when Kate Folk celebrates the paperback release of her debut story collection, Out There, at 9th Ave!
Featuring Tomas Moniz, Claire Stanford, and Maw Shein Win
Masks Required for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online at the link below
https://youtu.be/v0a_76uybCg
Praise for Out There
“Kate Folk’s stories inhabit otherworldly realms where exquisite language and beguiling characters excavate the very nature of love and existence.”—Adam Johnson
“Wonderfully weird and weirdly wonderful, Kate Folk is a dazzling talent.”—Karen Joy Fowler
“Out There is for readers who consider body horror to be a love language. True romantics will swoon either despite or because of the gore that accompanies these sharp, affable stories . . . Folk’s stories have been compared to Shirley Jackson’s, and this is most apparent in the way Folk balances her horror with humor.”—The New York Times Book Review
About Out There
A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life, “[as] if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” (Chang-Rae Lee).
With a focus on the weird and eerie forces that lurk beneath the surface of ordinary experience, Kate Folk’s debut collection is perfectly pitched to the madness of our current moment. A medical ward for a mysterious bone-melting disorder is the setting of a perilous love triangle. A curtain of void obliterates the globe at a steady pace, forcing Earth’s remaining inhabitants to decide with whom they want to spend eternity. A man fleeing personal scandal enters a codependent relationship with a house that requires a particularly demanding level of care. And in the title story, originally published in The New Yorker, a woman in San Francisco uses dating apps to find a partner despite the threat posed by “blots,” preternaturally handsome artificial men dispatched by Russian hackers to steal data. Meanwhile, in a poignant companion piece, a woman and a blot forge a genuine, albeit doomed, connection.
Prescient and wildly imaginative, Out There depicts an uncanny landscape that holds a mirror to our subconscious fears and desires. Each story beats with its own fierce heart, and together they herald an exciting new arrival in the tradition of speculative literary fiction.
About Kate Folk
Kate Folk has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and Zyzzyva. She’s received support from the Headlands Center for the Arts, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Recently, she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. She lives in San Francisco. Out There is her first book.
About Our Featured Readers
Tomas Moniz's debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the LAMBDA, and the Foreward Indies Awards. He edited the popular Rad Dad and Rad Families anthologies. He’s a 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts and 2022 UCross Resident. He teaches creative writing at Berkeley City College. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.
Maw Shein Win's most recent full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) which was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the California Independent Booksellers Alliance's Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Win's previous books include the full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts and chapbooks Ruins of a glittering palace and Score and Bone. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, California and teaches writing in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. Win often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers.
A thrilling new voice in fiction injects the absurd into the everyday to present a startling vision of modern life, “[as] if Kafka and Camus and Bradbury were penning episodes of Black Mirror” (Chang-Rae Lee, author of My Year Abroad).
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2022 BY GLAMOUR, ELECTRIC LIT, AND THE MILLIONS
Big Familia follows Juan Gutiérrez, a self-employed single father, as he navigates a tumultuous year of inescapable change. His daughter, Stella, is on the verge of moving away to college; his lover, Jared, is pressing him for commitment; and his favorite watering hole—a ramshackle dive presided over by Bob the Bartender—is transforming into a karaoke hotspot.
With sharp focus and startling language, the poems in Maw Shein Win’s second book, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, look through physical objects to glimpse the ephemeral, the material, and the immaterial.