For Immediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com
Mel Bosworth and Ryan Ridge at City Art
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday November 7th, 7:00—9:00
P.M.
Ryan Ridge and Mell Bosworth will read from their book Weird Weeks November 7th at the Salt Lake City Public Library at 7:00 P.M. as part of the City Art Reading Series.
Ryan Ridge author of two chapbooks and four books, including the hybrid novel, American Homes (University of Michigan Press, 2015), which was The Michigan Library Publishing Club’s inaugural book club pick. His work has appeared in Tin House Flash Fridays, Mississippi Review, Potomac Review, Los Angeles Review, Lumina, Salt Hill, Santa Monica Review, Passages North, and elsewhere. In 2016, Ridge received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction judged by Jonathan Lethem. His next book, Weird Weeks, a chapbook cowritten with Mel Bosworth, won the Editors’ Prize from The Cupboard Pamphlet and will be published in the fall of 2018. He's an assistant professor at Weber State University and lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. He edits the literary magazine Juked.
Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight, the poetry
chapbook Every Laundromat in the World, and co-author with Ryan
Ridge of Second Acts in American Lives. His work has
appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Per Contra, New World
Writing, Santa Monica Review, Melville House, American Book Review,
and elsewhere. A former series editor for the Wigleaf Top 50 and
a former assistant editor for The Best Small Fictions, Mel
curates the Small Press Book Review, an online archive. He
lives in Western Massachusetts.
Here’s a bit about the book that’s coming out in early November:
PRAISE FOR WEIRD WEEKS
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth have produced the most perfect weird book in Weird Weeks. Are these dreams? Fantasias? Postcards from a parallel universe? It doesn’t matter, because they’re so absorbing and funny and sad and good they deserve to just exist without category, to be read without anything but delight.”
—Amber Sparks author of The Unfinished World
“It seems like every week nowadays is a weird week, but not good weird. These pieces are good weird-–eccentric and surreal and ready to turn on a dime or even on a penny, funny and insane, but with a deep and sometimes grim human core.”
—Brian Evenson author of A Collapse of Horses
“Weird Weeks is another wild powerful duet album from Ridge and Bosworth, two flash fiction American masters. Each story howls with life and laughter. A sucker punch right to the heart. With echoes of James Tate, Donald Barthelme, and Italo Calvino, Weird Weeks rises to the occasion of our strange times and leaves the reader breathlessly alive. A full-tilt joyride for the soul, wonderfully weird and dangerously beautiful.”
—Michael Bible author of Sophia and Empire of Light
“Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth’s collection of coordinated tandem shenanigans, Weird Weeks, provides its reader with a series of dispatches from a realm so absurd it rivals our own. In an era when it’s easy to confuse satire for reality, The Onion for The Washington Post, we need a book like this one to put things in perspective, to give us a way to laugh at ourselves while absorbing the gut punch of how strange our lives can seem when seen through the twin lenses of two vibrant imaginations.”
-–Christopher Kennedy author of Clues from the Animal Kingdom
Most featured readings are followed by an open reading. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Catalyst, the Salt Lake City Public Library, Xmission, and the Zoo, Arts, and Park Fund.