The KGB Skatepark Experience (Helmet Required) December 15, 2008 – Posted in: KGB Readings

I had a dream last night that KGB had been bought out and was being turned into a skate park.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Dan, the bartender, was forced to work behind a one-way mirror wall and could only serve drinks through a small window like at the post office.  The walls of the bar were no longer filled with Soviet-era memorabilia, but were bare, gray bricks.  And the place had lost about fifty percent of its size.  The rest was being used for, you know, the skate ramps.  People were trying on their rollerblades in the adjacent room, where the wooden halfpipe lay under construction.  I was totally depressed, melancholy, and tried to convince my dream-self that all things change, to make the best of it. Maybe skaters would like a little speculative fiction between shreds.  After all, I was once one of them.  Thankfully this was just a dream.  The real KGB will not require you to wear a helmet or knee-pads, and Soviet kitsch still proudly hangs on the walls.  This Wednesday, you won’t have to speak to Dan through one-way glass to get a Baltika, and when you arrive for the reading of Christopher Barzak and Alaya Dawn Johnson you won’t have to walk through a gaggle of skaters and their haughtier-than-thou gazes.  More info on the evening’s events below:

FANTASTIC FICTION at KGB reading series, hosts Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present:

The Love We Share Without Knowing Christopher Barzak is the author of One for Sorrow and The Love We Share Without Knowing, just published by Bantam. His short stories have been published in the anthologies and magazines Salon Fantastique, The Coyote Road, Realms of Fantasy, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. He has stories forthcoming in The Beastly Bride and Asimov’s Science Fiction.
&
Racing the Dark

Alaya Dawn Johnson whose debut novel, Racing the Dark, was published last year. Its sequel, The Burning City, is forthcoming in Spring 2009. Her short fiction has appeared in Interzone, Strange Horizons, Fantasy, Year’s Best SF 11, and Year’s Best Fantasy 6.

* Mobile Libris will be there selling books

Wednesday December 17th, 7pm at

KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street (just off 2nd Ave, upstairs.)
http://www.kgbfantasticfiction.org/

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Readings are always free.

Please forward to friends at your own discretion.