Full Readercon Schedule June 26, 2011 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Here’s my full Readercon schedule.  I’m really looking forward to this year’s con and catching up with everyone there!

Thursday July 14

7:00 PM – Naked City reading at Porter Square Books, Porter Square Cambridge, 25 White St, Cambridge, MA — Not part of Readercon proper, I hope folks can make it out to this reading, which will also feature Kit Reed, Caitlin Kiernan, Jeffrey Ford, Ellen Kushner & John Crowley.

Friday July 15

5:00 PM NH    Steam-powered I & II group reading. Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Nicole Kornher-Stace, Matthew Kressel, Shira Lipkin, Sonya Taaffe, JoSelle Vanderhooft. Contributors to Steam-powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories and Steam-powered II: More Lesbian Steampunk Stories read selections from their work.

8:30 PM VT    Reading. Matthew Kressel. Kressel reads a new short story.

Saturday July 16

2:00 PM NH    Beneath Ceaseless Skies/Small Beer Press group reading. Scott H. Andrews, Chris N. Brown, Michael J. DeLuca, Gavin J. Grant, Matthew Kressel, Margaret Ronald. Small Beer Press authors and contributors to Beneath Ceaseless Skies read selections from their work.

9:00 PM ME    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology & Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the miniscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?