Category: Store Events

  • Quimby’s Presents Our First 24-Hour Zine Challenge Jan 14th-Jan 15th

     

    Perhaps you were not able to participate in the 2011 Revenge of Print Challenge by getting your zine or comic out. Or perhaps you need some encouragement. Do you work well under deadlines? Perhaps you’re addicted to the adrenal rush of zine crafting?

    Well, you’re in luck.

    The 24-Hour Zine Challenge is for you. Starting Sat, 1/14 at 7pm and going until 7pm on Sun 1/15 here at Quimby’s, we invite you to come in and make your zine within 24 hours. And we’ll let you crash at our pad. By “pad” we mean on our floor.

    We’ll provide: paper, minimal scanner use, zine supplies such as a long arm stapler, some food, power strips, temporary free wifi.

    You provide: sleeping gear, ideas, stamina, your computer or typewriter (if that’s your thing)

    AND THEN! Want to read from your zine here at one of our events? On Sat, Jan 28th we’ll be having the ZINES MADE AT THE QUIMBY’S 24 HOUR ZINE CHALLENGE EVENT.

    Please RSVP to info(at)quimbys(dot)com for the 24 Hour Zine Challenge by Wed, Jan 11th.  because there is limited space available. Only RSVP’d zinesters will be allowed in the store between midnight and 6am. Visitors are welcome at all other times. The store will be open until midnight (usually we close at 10pm on Saturday nights).

    Get your New Year’s zine resolution resolved before the first month of 2012 is over.

     Sat, Jan 14th 7pm to Sun, Jan 15th 7pm

  • Craig Thompson Celebrates Habibi 11/17

    Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, Habibi (Pantheon Books) tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, circumstance, and love. We follow them as their lives unfold together and apart; as they struggle to make a place for themselves in a world fueled by fear and greed.  At once contemporary and timeless, Habibi gives us a love story of astounding resonance; a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and the magic of storytelling.

    “Habibi is a remarkable feat of research, care, and black ink, and a reminder that all “People of the book,” despite the division of their individual traditions, share a mosaic of stories.”—Zadie Smith, Harper’s Magazine

    “A fantastical love story of a harem girl and the slave boy she rescues, inspired by the Arabian Nights, ancient calligraphy, and modern environmental catastrophe.”—Dan Kois, New York Magazine

    Craig Thompson is the award-winning author of the graphic novels Blankets  and Good-bye, Chunky Rice.

    For more info:
    http://www.facebook.com/CraigThompsonAuthor
    www.pantheonbooks.com

     

     

     

     

    Click here to download a copy of the press release for this event.

  • David David Katzman reads from A Greater Monster With Illustrator Caitlin McKay 11/10

    David David Katzman’s second novel, A Greater Monster (Bedhead Books), is a groundbreaking multimedia work that includes 65 pages of illustrations, numerous graphic design elements, visual text poetry, and links to two websites, one of which features original music composed to mirror events in a scene of the book and another featuring an animated sequence.

    This story itself is a psychedelic fairytale for the modern age, influenced by Alice in Wonderland, Williams S. Burroughs, and graphic novelist Grant Morrison. This darkly poetic tale takes you on a trip into a twisted alternate reality that reflects civilization like a funhouse mirror. A Greater Monster breathes new life into the possibilities of fiction.

    “Brilliant, insane, and utterly unique…”—Jen Knox, author of To Begin Again (2011 Next Generation Indie Book Award winner)

    “I can’t express how brilliant my favorite scenes in A Greater Monster are. In this extraordinary work, Katzman pushes language to do things, which are truly astounding.”—Carra Stratton, Editor, Starcherone Press

    “This is bizarro fiction at its most intense. It contains scenes and unique designs that seem engineered by some Mad Hatter and Chuck Palahniuk cross-breed.”—Lavinia Ludlow, author of alt.punk

    David David Katzman’s first novel, Death by Zamboni follows anti-hero Satan Donut through a world of mimes, TV stars, zombies, blockheads, mad scientists, riot grrls, and werewolves. It continues to be an acclaimed cult success. Katzman ‘s work has been published in Bridge Literary Magazine and Tailspins. He has a Master’s Degree in English Literature from University of Wisconsin-Madison and has performed as an actor and improviser throughout Chicago.
    Also in attendance will be the book's illustrator Caitlin McKay, who contributed over 60 pages of sequential illustrations to the book!

    For more info:
    daviddavid.net
    goodreads.com/daviddavid

    Thurs, November 10th, 7pm

    Click here to download the press release for this event.

  • Logan Square Literary Review Reads: Halloween Edition

    Kick-off your Halloween weekend with the Logan Square Literary Review Reads: Halloween Edition! Grab your pumpkin beers and trick-or-treat bags and prepare yourself for the spooky, scary and creepy as read by: Lara Levitan, Michael McCauley, Alicia Hilton and others!

    The Logan Square Literary Review is a not-for-profit quarterly journal based in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago, IL. This publication aims to facilitate expression and add to the thriving community of arts and ideas in Logan Square. The Logan Square Literary Review is dependent upon submissions from the public. This event is to celebrate issue VIII Fall 2011.

    Long live 60647!

  • Kevin Coval Performs Poetry From L-Vis Lives!: Racemusic Poems

    Spoken-word poet Kevin Coval, co-founder and Artistic Director of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, will perform at Quimby’s in support of his third collection of poetry L-vis Lives! Racemusic Poems (Haymarket Books, September).

    Coval, who has been hailed as “a new glowing voice in the world of literature” by Studs Terkel, explores the dynamic intersection of race and culture in America today with “L-vis,” an imagined persona and pastiche of artists who have used and misused Black music. In Coval’s poetic novella, L-vis’s story is equal parts autobiography and forgotten and re-imagined history. We see shades of Elvis Presley, the Beastie Boys, and Eminem, and meet some of history’s more obscure “whiteboy” heroes and antiheroes. A free audio preview of L-vis Lives!, with poems read by Coval and beats by Coolout Chris, can be heard here: http://bit.ly/oXSIxZ
    “This book is bold, brave and morally messy – twelve rounds of knock-down, drag-out shadowboxing against a shapeshifter. The dark humor, intellectual fervor, and emotional rigor Coval brings to bear animates these pieces, turns caricatures to characters…”
    —Adam Mansbach, author, Go the F**k to Sleep

    For performance, interview, and review requests, contact: Jon Kurinsky, Haymarket Books, jon@haymarketbooks.org

    Wed, Oct 12th, 7pm

    from hero to most
    i am a hero
    to most. the great hope
    of something other.
    a complex back-story.
    something other than
    the business of my father.
    bland’s antonym.
    jim crow’s black sheep.
    the forgotten son
    left to rise in the darkness
    among the dis
    carded in the wild
    of working class, single
    mother hoods.

  • Joe Janes and Friends Read from 50 Plays 10/1

    50 Plays by Joe Janes is the follow-up to the remarkable and insane 365 Sketches of 2010.  

    Joe Janes spent months working with fifty local directors and their chosen casts to write a ten-minute(ish) play for each one.

    A “Best of” presentation of pieces at Donny’s Skybox at Second City in August was hailed by the Chicago Reader as “”silly, bizarre, violent, and provocative” “…the pieces showcase Janes’s willingness to take risks of all kinds.”

    Joe Janes is a teacher, writer, actor, improviser and director in Chicago. He is the Improv Program Director in Columbia College’s Theater Department. At Second City, he teaches all levels of the writing program. He has worked for Second City for over a dozen years and in that time has performed in the national touring company, produced and directed at Second City – Detroit, directed for the touring company and Second City – Las Vegas.  He spent time as the artistic director of ComedySportz-Chicago where he developed their training center curriculum and created BattleProv. As a comedy writer, he wrote for and provided voices for Jellyvision’s You Don’t Know Jack series of CD-ROM trivia games, freelanced for SNL’s Weekend Update and won an Emmy for his work on Cincinnati’s Club 19. He is a founding member of The WNEP Theater Foundation for which he has written and performed for 20 years in such shows as The (Edward) Hopper Project, Metaluna and the Amazing Science of the Mind Revue, The Armageddon Radio Hour and Soiree Dada. He is also the artistic director of Robot vs. Dinosaur and a former company member of the hit show Improvised Shakespeare. Joe began his career as a stand-up comedian where he toured the country for five years opening for such acts as The Monkees, Bill Hicks, Rita Rudner, and Paula Poundstone. You can follow his exploits on his blog biteandsmile.blogspot.com and Twitter and become a fan of 365 Sketches on Facebook.

    Joe Janes can be contacted at jjanes@secondcity.com

     

    Sat, Oct 1st, 7pm  

  • Todd Dills and Friends Celebrate All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10 on 10/3

    THE2NDHAND’s founding editor, Todd Dills, joins contributors to launch the mag’s 10th-anniversary anthology: All Hands On: THE2NDHAND After 10

    THE2NDHAND began its life as an 11-by-17-inch block of black text on white paper peppered variously with photo-illustrations, comics, line drawings and distributed in storefronts first in Chicago, then in an ever-growing list of cities around the U.S. New writing, simply, has been its focus since editor and publisher Todd Dills (author of the novel Sons of the Rapture) founded it in 2000—a small format its physicality, but a loud mouth and a big heart its most important parts.

    “And without Quimby’s, where we began hosting readings shortly after we launched,” says Dills, “we would never have built the community of writers and readers we now enjoy.”

    After a successful Kickstarter campaign raised funds to print the book, All Hands On: THE2NDHAND after 10 arrived in August to lay down the best of the mag’s 10+ years of publishing writing by the budding insurgents of the American lit landscape—and others, no doubt. True to form, the book begins with a section of new, as-yet unpublished work, and follows with sections devoted to some of its best repeat writers, including those on the program for this event.

    Joining Nashville, Tenn.-based Dills at this event them are Time Out Chicago books editor and Featherproof Books publisher Jonathan Messinger (Hiding Out) and longtime THE2NDHAND contributors and Chicago residents Kate Duva and Jill Summers. For more about the book, as well as the writers, visit the2ndhand.com/THE2NDHANDTXT/books

  • Anne Elizabeth Moore Reads From Cambodian Grrrl With Sara Drake 9/29

    In Anne Elizabeth Moore’s new book Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, the writer and independent publisher brings her experience in the American cultural underground to Cambodia, a country known mostly for the savage extermination of around 2 million of its own under the four-year reign of the Khmer Rouge.

    “1000000000000000% punk rock.” –The Jacksonville Public Library

    “The best travel book I’ve read this year.” -USA Today

    Moore is a columnist for Truthout, and has written for The Progressive, Bitch, Annalemma, Tin House, the Boston Phoenix, and The Onion. The former editor of Punk Planet and the Comics Journal, Moore received a Fulbright to continue her work in Cambodia in 2010, and recently held a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her book Unmarketable was said to offer “something distinctly more radical than merely protesting against consumerism: a total rejection of the competitive ethos that drives capitalist culture” by the LA Times; deemed “a work of honesty and, yes, integrity” by Kirkus and called “sharp and valuable muckraking” by Time Out New York. It was also named a Best Book of 2007 by Mother Jones. See more at: anneelizabethmoore.com

    Moore will be joined by Chicago cartoonist and writer Sara Drake, currently planning a comics project in Cambodia. Find out more here: http://iydcpc.wordpress.com

    Thurs, Sep 29th, 7pm

  • Caroline Paquita of PEGACORN PRESS, reads and shows works with Jo Dery and Edie Fake

    Caroline Paquita will be in Chicago to release the first two official works out on this small, “queer, feminist, total-art-freaker,” publishing house, Pegacorn Press. Using Risograph duplicators to create such works as her comic-zine WOMANIMALISTIC and an annual calendar, this once informal self-publishing venture officially expanded and became it’s own formal entity earlier this year.

    In celebration, a 2012 calendar will be released, as well as a new comic compilation, featuring some of Chicago’s finest- Edie Fake and Jo Dery. Fake, Dery and a handful of artists in the U.S. and Germany were asked to create works surrounding the loose theme of of “2012,” and/or “THE FUTURE.” The result is a scintillating cornucopia of hilarity and social commentary, printed in an assortment of colored ink and paper-stock. Paquita’s yearly calendar features ”Womanimals” and other fanciful creatures gallivanting in jolly and curious environments. Wolves wearing wigs howl at the full moon, while tribes of Womanimals live in the trees with snakes and sloths- in 2012, anything is possible!

    Also joining the bill is Edie Fake and Jo Dery. Both will be presenting work at this event, including some of Jo’s stunning animations.

    Caroline Paquita is an artist/musician living and working out of Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been shown and distributed internationally and printed in such publications as Maximum Rock and Roll and Cometbus. A longtime creator of zines (Brazen Hussy, Zine Libs and most currently, WOMANIMALISTIC), a printmaker, and in general, a lover of all things made by hand, she began compiling heavy printing equipment in the hopes that one day she might begin a small publishing venture. PEGACORN PRESS is the result of this and her desire to create an environment where artists, particularly women and queers, are able to have the luxury to make work that will get printed and distributed to a larger audience. When she has spare time, she tends to her bees and hangs out with the chickens in her backyard.


    Jo Dery     is an artist who experiments with narrative form, using both traditional and new media. Her works include short films/videos, drawings, prints, illustration, installation, and artist/small-press book publications. Through the playful invention of characters and events, she investigates her relationship to the built environment, natural phenomena, history and current events, as well as aspects of cognition and consciousness. She currently lives in Chicago.

    Edie Fake was born in Chicagoland in 1980. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence in 2002 and has since clocked time in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Baltimore. He’s received a Critical Fierceness Grant for queer art and was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter’s Awards for Artists. His drawings have been included in Hot and Cold, Creative Time Comics, and LTTR. Gaylord is his first full-length book. Currently, he lives in Chicago where he works as a minicomics sommelier for Quimby’s Books.

    For more info:
    http://pegacornpress.blogspot.com/
    www.carolinepaquita.com
    http://www.jodery.com/
    http://vimeo.com/jodery
    http://www.ediefake.com/

  • The CWG Presents: Prompts/Prompted Here at Quimby's 9/23

    The Creative Writing Guild presents it’s latest publication, Prompts/Prompted. The dual issue is a compilation of instructions for experimental writing, and the CWG’s own written results. Five CWG contributors will read selections from the books, explain instructions, and share recent summer writing. Bring a pen and paper.

    The Creative Writing Guild aims to share experimental and traditional writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago writing community.

    cwgsaic.blogspot.com

    Fri, Sep 23rd, 7pm