literary shwag
Mario here:
I attended Chuck Palahniuk's signing at the Tattered Cover LoDo, one of the premier signing venues in the country. My son and I got there a half hour early and the place was already PACKED. 300 at least. Any author would be jealous of such a turnout. The butt beads were attached to bookmark shwag (this was a literary event, after all) promoting the new movie based on his book,
Choke.
Palahniuk read a short story he had penned especially for this Denver signing. The story was
Loser, about a frat boy tripping on LSD while a contestant on
The Price Is Right.
The lowbrow festivities continued when the TC staff tossed out blow-up dolls as souvenirs.
Here is Palahniuk describing his new work-in-progress: "
Pygmy is about a thirteen-year-old foreign-exchange student who comes over to the United States among maybe a dozen fellow exchange students who are twelve or thirteen-years old. And they’re from an unnamed totalitarian, dictatorial, maybe third-world country. And they’ve all been placed through this good Christian organization to live for six months with these nice, middle-class suburban families in the Midwest. And the truth, the gradual reveal, is that Pygmy and his fellow exchange students are all super-Ninja secret agents who’ve been trained from infancy in killing methods, and they’re all trained to exploit the families they’re with and gain government secrets, and then create science-fair projects that will be taken to Washington, D.C. for the finals – and the science-fair projects are weapons of mass destruction that will explode, killing millions of Americans."
I attended another signing last week,
Latinos in Lotusland, an anthology of short stories edited by Daniel Olivas (Bilingual Press, Tempe AZ). The contributing authors are from all over (Mario Suarez and Richard Vasquez have passed on) so in Denver, the TC Colfax signing was hosted by local writers Manuel Ramos (left) and Rudy Garcia (right).
Writers familiar with the elusive and frustrating struggle to break into Hollywood will especially appreciate the stories by Ramos and Wayne Rapp. Garcia's story was an intriguing noir tale about a ghostly Chicano legend.
I leave you with this amazing picture of the Rocket Wing Man, Swiss pilot Yves Rossy. Any bets when we'll see this in a James Bond movie?