RECORDS + RHYMES + REVIEWS EVERY FIRST FRIDAY AT THE WRITER’S BLOCK
Every first Friday of the month, join us for a collision between music, history, and artistry as industry veteran and renowned hip hop chronicler Rasar Amani (front man of Las Vegas’s own The Lique) explores some of the most transformative albums of yesterday and today through reviews, hot takes, Q&A’s, and special performances with notable Las Vegas musicians.
Featuring in March
Records by: DJ Mr. Vibe
Rhymes from: Rasar Amani + musical accompaniment
Reviews with: Naz Khalid
Featured Album: Aquemini by OutKast
@thevinylsaylv
This event is free and open to all ages.
BREAKOUT FICTION WRITER: JAMEL BRINKLEY
Monday March 09 | 7:00PM - 8:30PM
A CONVERSATION AND READING WITH THE AUTHOR OF A LUCKY MAN
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize. With incisive and nuanced prose, Jamel’s stories explore the charged, complex ties between men. Spend a night with us reflecting on tenderness and vulnerability in a world shaped by race, gender, and class.
The Writer’s Block will be selling the authors' books at the door. Please RSVP here.
GAYLE BRANDEIS
Friday March 13 | 6:30PM - 7:30PM
READING AND BOOK SIGNING WITH THE AUTHOR OF MANY RESTLESS CONCERNS: THE VICTIMS OF COUNTESS BATHORY SPEAK IN CHORUS
Although Many Restless Concerns illuminates the horror of absolute control over others, it also shines a beacon on the strength of women sharing their truths one by one, of spirits joining together to topple the seemingly untouchable. This work speaks to our own times, to our #metoo reckoning, to our power as survivors to take back our stories and reclaim the darkness.Oppression of any kind never holds, even if it takes the dead to bring it down. This book is a haunting, essential read for all uneasy souls.
-Laraine Herring
Gayle Brandeis grew up in the Chicago area and has been writing poems and stories since she was four years old. Brandeis is the author of The Art of Misdiagnosis (memoir), The Selfless Bliss of the Body (poetry), Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (craft), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (winner of The Bellwether Prize), Self Storage, Delta Girls, and My Life with the Lincolns. Her novel in poems, Many Restless Concerns: The Victims of Countess Bathory Speak in Chorus (A Testimony) was published by Black Lawrence Press in February 2020. Gayle’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies (such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, O, The Oprah Magazine, Longreads, Salon, The Rumpus, The Nation, The Mississippi Review, and many others) and have received several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelley Peace Poetry Award, a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. Gayle is the founding editor of the online journal, Lady/Liberty/Lit. She is also mom to kids born in 1990, 1993 and 2009.
BIG BOOK CLUB, PART 2
Thursday March 19 | 6:00PM - 7:00PM
THIS SPRING: THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
A two-part book club discussion of Thomas Mann's seminal novel, The Magic Mountain (Previous meeting: January 30th).
The Big Book Club tackles some of the thickest and most enduring novels in world literature. Broken into two sessions over four months, the club invites readers to experience these books at a leisurely pace, and to enjoy the companionship of fellow readers making the same journey at the same time.
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
Club attendees will be reading John E. Woods's English translation of the German masterpiece.
This is the second of two book-club sessions. Attendees are encouraged to finish The Magic Mountain by this second meeting.
WHAT WOULD TWITTER DO?
Tuesday March 24 | 7:00PM - 8:30PM
KRISTEN ARNETT AND MORGAN PARKER IN CONVERSATION ABOUT ONLINE LIFE
This event will take place on the campus of UNLV at RLL 101 (4505 S. Maryland Pkwy).
Join us as BMI Shearing Fellow Kristen Arnett and writer Morgan Parker discuss their philosophies and practices around Twitter, their online personas, 240 character constraints, and the act of subverting online noise. Every day, Arnett tweets good morning to a different character in her life, while Parker delivers one-liner truisms. Writers and Twitter icons Kristen Arnett and Morgan Parker bring to life Sheila Heti’s bygone column “What Would Twitter Do?” from The Believer.
Kristen Arnettis the New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things. She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter‘s Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her story collection, Felt in the Jaw was published by Split Lip Press and was awarded the 2017 Coil Book Award.
Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the poetry collections Magical Negro (2019), There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (2017), Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (2015), and the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? (2019). A debut book of nonfiction is forthcoming from One World. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.”
This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here.
BETH LISICK
Thursday March 26 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM
READING AND BOOK SIGNING WITH THE AUTHOR OF EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN
FOLLOWED BY A CONVERSATION WITH DAYVID FIGLER
In late '90s San Francisco, Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city's alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn't changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium's end are long gone. When her mother dies, leaving her Silicon Valley home to Edie, she finds herself mourning her loss in the heart of the Bay Area's tech monoculture, and embarks on a last-ditch quest to hold on to her rebel heart.
New York Times bestseller Beth Lisick's first novel EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN chronicles Silicon Valley's rapidly changing culture with biting observational humor, an insider's wisdom, and disarming pathos, while asking, "What comes after It?"
Beth Lisick is a writer and actor from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living in Brooklyn. She is the author of five previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Everybody Into the Pool, and co-founder of the Porchlight Storytelling Series. Beth has also worked as a baker, a promotional banana mascot, a background extra for TV and film, and an aide to people with developmental disabilities and dementia. This is her first novel.
@
