My Readercon Schedule (revised) July 8, 2011 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Here’s my hopefully final Readercon schedule.  I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Thursday July 14th

7pm – Naked City Reading (Off-site!)– Ellen Datlow, editor of Naked City: Tales of Urban Fantasy will host a reading/signing on 07/14/2011 7:00 pm at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street, Cambridge, MA, 617-491-2220, http://www.portersquarebooks.com/.  The readers for this event will be Jeffrey Ford, Kit Reed,  Matthew Kressel, John Crowley, Ellen Kushner, & Caitlín R. Kiernan.

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.

7:30 PM VT    Reading. Matthew Kressel. Kressel reads a new short story.

8:00 PM ME    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology and Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Chris Moriarty, 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 minuscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

Saturday July 16

2:30 PM NH    Beneath Ceaseless Skies group reading. Scott H. Andrews, Michael J. DeLuca, Matthew Kressel, Margaret Ronald. Contributors to Beneath Ceaseless Skies read selections from their work