Two really great readings are happening tonight — you’d be nuts to miss out. One, “An Awesome Reading,” is sponsored by featherproof books and Open Books, and will highlight folks with brand-new or about-to-be-released chapbooks. Amy McDaniel, Jamie Kazay, Dave Snyder, and Mary Hamilton are all going to read. It’s at Open Books (213 W. Institute Place), home of the fancy ruby stage, from 7-9pm. All awesome details here.

At the same time and just a little bit north, FC2/Big Other contributors Rob Stephenson, Cris Mazza, David Schneiderman, Kathleen Rooney, Jac Jemc, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and AD Jameson will read at 2542 W Chicago Ave. (The jam’s organized by Green Lantern, but please note that it’s not at their space on Milwaukee.) Spacebook invite here. See you there, squirrelly friends! Let’s all get tacos at 9:30, OK? OK.

… is this weekend, all weekend, and almost everything but the hot dogs are free. There’s a map here, but it’s much more fun to get off the Red Line at Harrison (or Blue, Pink, Brown, Orange, Purple at Library, Green at Roosevelt) and wander. Wonder. Full schedule here.

Spit and a Half, the zine/comic mailorder distro run by John Porcellino of King-Cat Comics (also the guy who drew the image above), just uploaded a whole bunch of new stuff, o wow — ogle it all here, buy most of it, then eat ramen and drink cheap beer for the rest of the month. NO REGRETS!

For the last seven years, journalist and critic Robert K. Elder has listened to the last words of people about to be executed. “Listened” means reading newspaper accounts, combing through prison archives, talking with counselors — and in 2010, Elder published many of these in the straightforwardly titled Last Words of the Executed, available from University of Chicago Press.

What’s most impressive about the book — besides an introduction from the late Studs Terkel and a blurb from Sister Helen Prejean — is its focus on people, not politics.

Last Words is an oral history, including everyone from William Robinson, a Quaker executed in 1659 for religious protests to Aileen Wuornos, put to death in 2002 for killing six men. And while of course anything with a barcode and a Library of Congress entry is somehow political, Last Words, organized by timeline and execution method, stands out for its clear, no bones presentation. Its storytelling. It’s like you were in the room, the square, on the front steps. Parts are funny and parts are sad and parts are nuts.

Tomorrow, Thursday June 10th at 7:00, just off the Damen Blue Line at the Stop Smiling Storefront (1371 N Milwaukee), you can hear Robert Elder fireside chatting about the book with Rick Kogan, newspaperman extraordinaire, for free. The event is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago and Stop Smiling. Full details (and sweet graphics) on the Stop Smiling website.

Attn. writers! Ever been published in [phew!]: 3:AM Magazine, Anderbo, Collagist, decomP, Dogplotz, Electric Lit, Eyeshot, Hobart, Identity Theory, JMWW, Keyhole, Laminantion Colony, Necessary Fiction, No Colony, NOÖ, NYTyrant, Pank, Pindeldyboz, Monkeybicycle, mudlucious, Opium, or Word Riot? Well! On Monday, June 7th, Word Riot wants to publish your novel or short story collection: as a PDF, for one day.

Details are here, on their blog — if you want to participate but haven’t written for any of those particular publications, you can lobby for yourself there, too. Literago.org nominates ACM, the2ndhand, Artifice … [image credit]

Because Renay Kerkman and Penelope Rosemont asked and also because we think it’s important, Literago.org is reposting ANOTHER PARADISE LOST! A Surrealist Program of Demands on the Gulf of Mexico Oil Disaster – please read it once to yourself, once out loud in public, and then circulate it among your networks, too. – Eds.

O octopus, with your silken look! whose soul is inseparable from mine … (The Songs of Maldoror)

We are through with the rational, reasonable, realistic and scientific solutions of faith-based positivism. Instead, we make the following demands and dedicate them to Judi Bari, an Earth First! liberator and lover of old-growth trees who was car-bombed by the forces of law-’n'-order twenty years ago on May 24th. Long live Judi Bari! Solidarity with Marie Mason, Oso Blanco Chubbock, Mumia Abu Jamal, and the Tarnac 9!

1. CLARIFICATION: It needs to be made clear that this is not an “oil spill.” This is a manmade disaster. Depending on which official version you chose to believe, millions of gallons of oil have been gushing into the ocean every day since April 22, 2010. A “spill” is what happens when a drinking glass of water tips over; this is and always has been an unstoppable, unpluggable, uncleanable, uncontrollable, unleashed man-made geyser of toxic disaster.

2. PEOPLE’S TRIBUNALS FOR ECOTERRORISTS: An injury to one is an injury to all! We charge every BP America executive and governmental overseer of offshore oil drilling with manslaughter and ecocide. The mansions, yachts, and private jets seized from these executives and bureaucrats will be converted into sandboxes, tree forts, rain gardens, greenhouses, and amusement parks. The accused must face a people’s tribunal and stand trial in the Gulf Shore communities that their actions (and inactions) have affected, particularly the families of those eleven workers killed when the BP rig exploded. Bussed in from the cities, the underground, and the countryside, members of Earth Liberation Front and Earth First! should be on hand to witness the proceedings, especially those who are currently serving harsh prison sentences for their work in defense of the natural world. The least that we can hope for as an outcome is that the accused will be tarred with their own petroleum wastes and feathered with the soiled plumage of murdered birds.

3. DISMANTLING OF ALL OIL, COAL, AND NUCLEAR POWER COMPANIES: The obscene perpetuation of environmental devastation and endless wars in the name of energy company profits cannot be tolerated any longer. In the name of brown pelicans, shrimp, frigate birds, marlins, sea bass, laughing gulls, octopi, and piping plovers, we demand an immediate and total cessation of the violent industrialized extraction of oil and coal from the Earth. We also call for the shutting down of all nuclear power facilities whose foul radioactive wastes threaten ecologies everywhere.

4. DISSOLUTION OF ALL MEDIA CORPORATIONS: Our friend in New Orleans, Max Cafard, reports that monstrous tentacles of oil measuring ten miles long and three miles wide continue to grow beneath the waves, yet tellingly the media industry remains focused on the multicolored “sheen” on the sea’s surface. News outlets dutifully parrot the oil company’s party line of official estimates and explanations. When one BP official said that this disaster was a good opportunity to experiment with pollution containment strategies, no news agency explored the implications of an industry that can trigger a catastrophe and then grope around in the dark for a way out of it. In another interview with a BP spokesman, the CNN reporter concluded the report with the sympathetic assurance that “We’re all praying” for the corporation. Clearly, the media serve only the interests of their stockholders and the State in their coverage of this atrocity. Therefore we call for all equipment and broadcast network technology currently used to disseminate these outrageous lies and propaganda (”We’re glad that you’re on the job, Admiral”; “Don’t worry-warm water microbes break down the oil”) to be collectivized and re-distributed on street corners in order to encourage more participation and free expression in the report and analysis of such tragedies.

5. EMERGENCY MASS ACTION: We call upon everyone to defend your homes, your loved ones, and the Earth from destruction. We have seen the graffiti in Mobile, Alabama: “When life gives you oil spills, make Molotovs!”

- THE SURREALIST MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

Switchback Books is a feminist poetry press founded in 2006 by Becca Klaver, Brandi Homan, and Hanna Andrews, who met in the MFA program at Columbia College Chicago.

In 2010, Switchback has published six books, all sharply designed and covering an impressive range of topics from marriage to illness to animals that change shape and even English as a second language. The books are feminist but not in a narcissistic way, no: in the way that looks at borders and transition and changing beauty. They’re more Judith Butler and Judy Blume, less getting back at your boyfriend, know what we’re saying?

And the deadline for Switchback Books’ annual Gatewood Prize (named for Emma Gatewood, first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail), is coming up soon. The Prize goes to a first or second full-length collection of poems by a woman (Switchback’s definition includes transsexual, transgender, genderqueer, and female-identified individuals) in the English language.

This year’s judge is Cathy Park Hong, and the submission deadline is June 1st: 48-80 pages, $15 entry fee, submission via Manuscript Hub. Full details here, sample poems from previous winners there.

Literago.org high-fives A.D. Jameson (and recommends you read his entire piece — posted at BIG OTHER, hotlinked below):

I would like to make more money. I’d like to be able to sell my writing. And I want a job that I don’t detest, and that doesn’t make me too exhausted or bitter to then not be able to write. I want to be able to get health care if/when I get sick … If I want to buy something reasonable, I want to be able to do that, too. And I’d like for my work to be available to others—so that if someone wants to buy it, or otherwise get it, they’ll be able to. Money is a means to all these ends.

But not the only means … What I really want, I think, is to be supported: by myself, but also by my culture …

When I first moved to Chicago, I spent a lot of time reading books on trains. When you’re poor and new and looking for a job, it’s nice, riding the train and reading. It buys time, and it’s cheap. You go in circles through the white noise, reading and reading and making notes. Nobody bothers you.

Dalkey Archive titles were especially great picks, with their good weird weighty stories and summer-colored covers. Plus you looked kinda art and smart, reading them, sometimes so much so that you’d get a missed connection or two.

But you know what? It would’ove been better to actually make the connection in realtime. I shoulda looked up once in a while. I shoulda talked with people about how good those books were. 

Well! Tonight, you can do this! Joshua Cohen, author of the muchly-trumpeted Witz, “the sort of postmo dern epic that arrives like a comet about once every decade,” will be reading from his book (it’s an 800-page novel about a Christmas Eve plague that kills all the world’s Jews, except the firstborn sons — it’s meaty and conflicted and somehow also funny, like all lasting brave books need to be). Seriously, dudes: this is an epic Pynchon-stylee work, and it was published in full, Joycean spit at the end, which makes it renegade in 2010. It’s a Thing, and it is in our time, and you need to hear it read.  

Joining Cohen is Jesse Ball, who wrote Samedi the Deafness, also a good choice for trains. Afterwards, there’s a Q&A with Dalkey’s Martin Riker. 

The event, sponsored by Stop Smiling, starts at 7:00 at 1371 N Milwaukee Ave, just off the Damen Blue Line. It’s free. There’ll be drinks. You should go! and listen and talk, maybe even buy a book and read it, visibly, on the train home. (But geez! Look up, every other stop or so, and wink at someone watching you. See what happens.)

OK so everyone knows Quimby’s has a blog, and everyone knows Quimby’s post a weekly Top Ten Bestseller List, and everyone knows those books and zines are, like, the greatest things ever to spend money on, right? Right. We thought so. Here’s this week’s ten:

1. Big Questions #14: Title and Deed by Anders Nilsen

2. Butt #28: Fantastic Magazine for Homosexuals 

3. O Fallen Angel by Kate Zambreno

4. Craphound #4 Clowns Devils and Bait 

5. Weathercraft by Jim Woodring (pictured!)

6. You’re a Horrible Person But I Like You: Believer Book of Advice by var.

7. Bad World Small Things by William Cleveland

8. Gaylord Phoenix #2 by Edie Fake

9. Lose #2 by Michael Deforge

10. How To Make Soap Without Burning your Face Off by Raleigh Briggs