Join Elissa Schappell, Dawn Raffel, Greg Spatz and More at Soft Shadows

“My short stories are like soft shadows I have set out in the world, faint footprints I have left.”

― Haruki Murakami

On September 18, 2013 at 8PM, Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House will present a Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event: SOFT SHADOWS: A CELEBRATION OF THE SHORT STORY with Elissa Schappell, Dawn Raffel, Gregory Spatz,, Clifford Thompson and Ron Parsons, who will read and discuss their work and their favorite short stories. Louise Crawford will host.

Audience members will be invited open-mic style to share their favorite published stories and read the first paragraph.

A $5 suggested donation will include wine and snacks. Books will be sold and signed.

The Old Stone House: 336 Third Street between 5th and 4th Avenues. R train to Union Street, F train to Fourth Avenue. 718-768-3195. For interviews and inquiries: 718-288-4290

ABOUT THE FEATURED AUTHORS

DAWN RAFFEL’s illustrated memoir, The Secret Life of Objects, was published in June and was on Oprah’s Summer Reading List and Best Memoir List for 2012. She is also the author of two story collections— Further Adventures in the Restless Universe and In the Year of Long Division (soon to be reissued)—and a novel, Carrying the Body. Her stories have appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, BOMB, Conjunctions, Black Book, Fence, Open City, The Mississippi Review Prize Anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Arts & Letters, The Quarterly, NOON, and numerous other periodicals and anthologies. She was a fiction editor for many years, followed by a seven-year stint as Executive Articles Editor at O, The Oprah Magazine and three years as Editor-at-Large at More magazine; she has also taught in the MFA program at Columbia University and at the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia; Montreal; and Vilnius, Lithuania. She is now Editor at Large, Books at Readers Digest, and the editor of The Literarian, the magazine for the Center for Fiction in New York. She lives outside New York City with her husband and sons.

ELISSA SCHAPPELL is the author of Blueprints for Building Better Girls and Use Me, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award. She is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where she the author of the “Hot-Type” column. She has been a Senior Editor at the Paris Review and is a founding editor of the literary magazine, Tin House. Elissa has also been the co-editor of the anthologies, The Friend Who Got Away and Money Changes Everything. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.

GREGORY SPATZ is the author of novels Inukshuk, Fiddler’s Dream and No One But Us, as well as short story collections, Half as Happy and Wonderful Tricks. His short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines such as Glimmer Train Stories, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Epoch, Santa Monica Review, The New Yorker, etc., and he has published numerous book and music reviews for The Oxford American. He’s won numerous grants from the Washington State Artist Trust, as well as a Washington State Book Award, and in 2011 he was named Individual Artist of the Year by the Spokane Arts Commission. He is also the recipient of a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship.

CLIFFORD THOMPSON is the author of Love for Sale and Other Essays from Autumn House Press. His essays about books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, Commonweal, Film Quarterly, Cineaste, Oxford American, Black Issues Book Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of a novel, Signifying Nothing. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and children.

RON PARSONS is the author of the new story collection The Sense of Touch from Aqueous Books. He is writer living in Sioux Falls. Born in Michigan and raised in South Dakota, he was inspired to begin writing fiction in Minneapolis while attending the University of Minnesota. His short stories have appeared in such places as The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, The Briar Cliff Review, Flyway, and The Onion. This is his debut collection.

ABOUT THE HOST

Louise Crawford runs Brooklyn Readings Works, which has been called “the best place to chase fiction with a little history” by Conde Nast Traveler. She is the founder of the popular blog Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Blogfest, an annual networking event for bloggers. Her company Brooklyn Social Media gets the word out about artists and entrepreneurs.