Category: Store Events

  • "Work In Progress" Meet-Up

    Join us for our monthly get-together entitled “Work In Progress.” The idea is to provides feedback, community and work space. You can bring whatever you’re working on, whether it’s a zine, a comic, or some other project. We’ll provide the space and time, you provide the help for each other. This monthly event will take shape however it needs to. It will meet on the last Wednesday of every month here at Quimby’s from 7pm-8:30pm.

    Here’s what we’re hoping “Work In Progress” will offer:

    -Feedback. You can bring what you’re working on and get the feedback you need from other like-minded people. Maybe you need this feedback to be in the form of an informal discussion or you need it be in the form of a workshop. Or maybe you need it to be in some other format that will take shape at that moment. Or maybe there’s something else entirely different that you need help with. Perhaps you need to find somebody who can talk to you about finding a a good printer. Or maybe you want to ask other creators how they perform their work once they’ve written it. Who knows what? This is truly a “Work In Progress” that will organically take shape based on the people that attend it. You yourself may be helpful to someone else if you possess the know-how for something they need.

    -Creative networking and community. Yes, this sounds super cheesy, but still. Here’s your chance to meet other people who are in your writing/art/general creative community. Who knows what can happen? Maybe you’ll find some other social misfit like yourself. Maybe you’ll meet a future collaborator or a friend. Maybe you’ll form a collective with some folks you meet. Maybe you’ll publish something with someone you meet. This will be exciting to see who meets who and what alliances are made. We meet so many great people that come through Quimby’s. It’s time for all of you to meet each other.

    -Work space and designated time. Maybe you need to leave your house to get some work done. Maybe you need a designated time and place to force you to actually get some creative work done. Are you one of those people that if you were left to your on devices you’d never get anything done? You’ve got all these good ideas but you never do anything with them. Maybe this is the inspirational kick in the pants you need. Or maybe you just need to be surrounded by other people while you work, because for you, working alone at home is less fun. And unlike working at coffee shops, you won’t feel weird about talking to people you don’t know.

    So maybe you’ve noticed that it’s not quite a workshop, not quite a skillshare, not quite an open house, and yet it can be all three. See you there!

  • Chicago author Josh Wilker reads from Cardboard Gods

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    Cardboard Gods is the memoir of Josh Wilker, a brilliant writer who has marked the stages of his life through the baseball cards he collected as a child.  While it is rooted in a life obsessed with baseball, Cardboard Gods is much more than just a baseball book; it’s a touching family saga that perfectly captures an era, the late 1970s. Like Nick Hornby or Chuck Klosterman, Wilker finds something very large in the seemingly small.

    Josh expertly shares his classic observations about his central artifacts, the baseball cards, while setting up the poignant tales of his youth.  He uses the magical bubble-blowing powers of journeyman Kurt Bevacqua to shed light on the weakening of the powerful childhood bond with his older brother; he considers the doomed utopian back-to-the-land dreams of his hippie parents against the backdrop of inimitable 1970s baseball figures such as “Designated Pinch Runner” Herb Washington and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych; he writes about an imagined correspondence with his favorite player, Carl Yastrzemski.  Cardboard Gods is both the perfect book for baseball fans and a great read for anyone compelled by the question, “What if what’s gone can return?”

    “Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods is a poignant and vivid account of how and why he accessed baseball cards as a survival tool while negotiating a 1970s childhood marked by changing mores and confusing mixed messages.  This is a story of brotherly love, survival of the also-ran, and the hope that quickens a kid’s heartbeat each time he rips open a fresh pack of baseball cards, gets a whiff of bubble gum, and, holding his breath, sees who he’s got as opposed to who and what he needs.  If you love the writing of Dave Eggers or Augusten Burroughs, you just may love Josh Wilker’s Cardboard Gods, too.  I did.”
    –Wally Lamb, New York Times bestselling author of She’s Come Undone and The Hour I First Believed

    “Josh Wilker writes as beautifully about baseball and life as anyone ever has.”
    –Rob Neyer, ESPN

    For more info: http://cardboardgods.net/cardboard-gods-the-book/

  • Librarian Zinesters and Zine Librarians at Quimby’s

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    Four card-catalog-holding librarians will ride into Quimbys on their book carts, zines in hands on April 23rd. These self-professed print culture nerd zinesters will read at what promises to be an entertaining evening stereotype busting. What, you thought all librarians shushed? Well, shush to you.

    Zinesters reading include:

    Celia Perez, author of the perzine I Dreamed I Was Assertive and mamazine Roots & Wings;

    Library school student Jami Thompson of the long-running No Better Voice;

    Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out and Reading Log publisher Jenna Freedman

    Nell Taylor, zine contributor and Executive Director of the Chicago Underground Library

    There may even be limited references to Boolean operators. You won’t want to miss this chance to get your library geek on!

    For more info: http://zinelibraries.info/2010/03/28/zine-librarians-zine-reading-at-quimbys

  • Patrick Wensink and Michael Allen Rose

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    Yes, there will be (a) Sex Dungeon for Sale! at Quimby’s. The book with that title, that is.

    Combine an optimistic realtor selling a home with a sexual playground, a kindergartener convinced he’s actually French, and something called “Chicken Soup for the Kidnapper’s Soul,” and you get Patrick Wensink’s hilarious collection of short stories titled Sex Dungeon for Sale! (Eraserhead Press). Join Patrick Wensink as he reads from this new book.

    Sex Dungeon for Sale! takes these bold characters and a few other outrageous situations to create an unforgettable and quick literary ride. While keeping an eye focused on the surreal, but both feet firmly planted in reality, these stories dissect a modern world so strange you have to laugh. Wensink’s punchy style is perfect for the brevity-obsessed Twitter generation, but saves room in his utility belt of brief tales for humor, humanity and an extra helping of WTF?.

    “A deliciously dark and funny book” –Louisville Courier-Journal

    “Unputdownable” –The Next Best Book

    “Wensink’s evident writerly talents make this an auspicious debut.” –James Greer, author of Artificial Light and The Failure

    “Sex Dungeon for Sale!  takes facets of everyday American life and twists them until they gag out comedic gold.” -Joey Goebel, author of Torture the Artist and The Anomalies

    Also joining the bill is Chicago’s playwright Michael Allen Rose, who will read from his RoShamBo Theatre production Attack Ships on Fire.

    For more info: http://www.patrickwensink.com

  • Joe Meno Reads From The Great Perhaps

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    Joe Meno     is an accomplished young writer and playwright from Chicago. A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award, he is the author of four novels and two story collections. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s and broadcast on NPR, and he was a longtime contributing editor to Punk Planet magazine. Time Out Chicago recently called him one of their “cultural heroes,” and in a recent feature on Chicago, GQ wrote that Joe is “the closest thing we’ve got to a literary ambassador.” And now, in his latest novel a soft cover version of THE GREAT PERHAPS (W. W. Norton) Meno returns to that Chicago landscape to introduce five characters searching for simple ways to understand the world’s big questions–Professor Jonathan Casper, his wife, two daughters, and father.
    Madeline, Jonathan’s wife, is an animal behaviorist tracking the aggressive behavior of pigeons. The study is compromised, though, by Madeline’s inability to remain an observer; instead she finds herself consistently interceding in her subjects’ cages, trying to save the submissive creatures from the forceful ones. When she’s home from the lab, Madeline feels compelled to watch the news coverage of the ground war in Iraq. This fascination is often counterbalanced by a flood of anxiety that takes over every time she tries to understand the human aggression splashed across the TV screen.
    Jonathan is also a scientist struggling with his work. A paleontologist who has devoted his entire life to finding a giant, prehistoric squid, Jonathan is on the verge of being beaten to the discovery of the elusive creature by the young, talented, and highly respected Dr. Jacques Albert. To Jonathan, this creature is the imperative missing piece that will confirm evolution as the indisputable force propelling animal life, providing the scientific community with the necessary tools to truly understand where humans have come from.
    The stress of these pursuits takes its toll on Jonathan and Madeline’s marriage, and the two find themselves looking into the realms that their subjects inhabit. Jonathan daydreams about the depths in which his muse swims while gazing at maps of the ocean, and Madeline looks to the sky for comfort, company and rejuvenation.

    Also joining the bill is:    Jon Resh, author of Amped, Gretchen Kalwinski, of literago.org fame, Patrick Somerville, author of Trouble (Vintage) and The Cradle (Little, Brown), and folks from Knee-Jerk Magazine.

    For more info: http://www.joemeno.com http://www.gretchenkalwinski.com
    http://patricksomerville.com http://www.kneejerkmag.com

  • J. Bradley Reads From Dodging Traffic

    J. Bradley points to three enduring sources for his inspiration: Jameson, revenge, and his wife, Jelian. Not a likely combination for a poet, but one that has brought forth Dodging Traffic (Ampersand Books).  Loud, raucous, lively: J. Bradley’s poetry is widely published and admired, and, in this, his first collection, he brings the full bore of his trademark poetic styling and larger-than-life imagery.  Lust, love, contempt, disgust, parental guidance, and poetic revenge, crafted with unbridled imagination and unmistakable skill. Dodging Traffic hearkens back to the times of childhood, when life was still interesting and imagination could bring cardboard boxes and discarded love affairs to life.

    “J. Bradley is the Veruca Salt of the literary chocolate factory, writing with a satirical brazenness that leaves cavities among the reader’s eyes.  There is a sugary darkness to his work and a lackadaisical charm; that of a black-market dental hygienist.  J. delivers new audacity, important romance, and certainty.  He acknowledges the sensational ugly without apprehension. His ideas are of an entirely different species and his wit knocks at postmodern…stunned today, laughing tomorrow. Dodging Traffic is the classic, the sequel will forever envy.”    -Sarah Morgan, Author of Animal Ballistics

    For more info: http://iheartfailure.net

  • Joyland vs. CellStories: Brian Joseph Davis of Joyland + Dan Sinker

    Brian Joseph Davis of Joyland will be reading from Ronald Reagan, My Father and Dan Sinker of CellStories will present stories from cellphones.
    By the time Brian Joseph Davis stops in Chicago to promote his new collection of short stories, Ronald Reagan, My Father (ECW), over half will have been given away via Chicagoan Dan Sinker’s CellStories project. The two met when Sinker was finding content partners and Joyland.ca, a short story web journal edited in 7 different North American cities and co-founded by Davis, was a perfect match, leading to Davis to experiment with distributing his own stories. Tonight they’ll read and talk about the ins and outs of free fiction.

    Ronald Reagan, My Father
    Ronald Reagan, My Father

    In Ronald Reagan, My Father the elderly take to the streets at night for illegal electric scooter racing. A copy editor suffers brain damage from a virus and is suddenly filled with cannibalistic violence and award-winning minimalist poetry. A Texas doctor transplants the mind of a meth-addicted convict into the body of a suburban web developer, resulting in America’s first “death-penalty case that turned into a custody case that turned into a right-to-die case.” Brian Joseph Davis is an artist and the author of Portable Altamont, a collection that garnered praise from Spin Magazine for its “elegant, wise-ass rush of truth, hiding riotous social commentary in slanderous jokes.” Slate called his first novel,
    I, Tania, “The book of your fever dreams.”

    Dan Sinker is the founder of Punk Planet magazine and is the creator of CellStories, which provides a new short story or essay everyday and has been recently praised in Publisher’s Weekly for its bold approach to networked reading.

    For more info: http://www.joyland.ca , http://brianjosephdavis.com/ , http://www.cellstories.net

  • Chicago Zine Fest Zine Reading

    Quimby’s Bookstore will help kick off the Chicago Zine Fest by hosting a zine reading, Friday, March 12 at 7pm. Reading will be authors who span the range of self-publishing, from minicomics, to fiction, to cultural criticism. Three of the Zine Fest’s special guests, John Porcellino, Anne Elizabeth Moore and Jeffrey Brown will read alongside five zinesters who were selected by random lottery among exhibitors.
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    John Porcellino draws the minicomic, King Cat, which he has been self-publishing since 1989.

    Anne Elizabeth Moore is the author of Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing and the Erosion of Integrity. She is the former editor of Punk Planet, and teaches at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

    Jeffrey Brown is the award-winning comics artist behind the graphic novels Clumsy, Funny Misshapen Body, and the Incredible Changebots.

    Amber Forrester, a long time feminist zinester, writes about small town revolutions and queer (in)visibility.

    Monica Anderson writes and draws comics in her personal zine Endless Escalators.

    Michelle Aiello is a Chicago-based writer, stationary designer and organizer of the Ephemera Festival.

    Anthony Marvullo is a Boston-based poet, author of Various Segments of Industry, a chapbook about power tools.

    Sarala Bee is a Montreal-based writer whose zines dealing with depression, love, and sex.

    Quimby’s staff will start the event with an opening ceremony, which will include the presentation of the inaugural Quimby’s Long Arm Stapler Award. The award is designed to recognize and encourage an individual or group’s enthusiasm, inspiration, and commitment to self-publishing and the self- publishing community. The award’s recipient has yet to be announced.

    For more info about the zine fest: http://www.chicagozinefest.org

  • Nancy Stohlman Reads From Searching for Suzi

    What happens when an ex-stripper in her mid-thirties, married with children, awakens one day questioning what brought her to a current life of complicated domesticity? Compelled to return to Omaha after seventeen years, the narrator we only know as Natalie begins a quest into her past, an adventure that takes the reader from childhood beauty pageants to the sex and glamour industries. Natalie’s search becomes an intrepid journey through her own sexuality, a woman not only claiming herself but also accepting her contradictions. With inquisitive perception and agile use of perspective, Searching for Suzi (Monkey Puzzle Press) is an investigation into the tragic shadows of a past preferred to be forgotten.

    “Sexy, gutsy, raw and mature. A literary strip tease, Nancy Stohlman lures us through the layers of her dark world with the promise of exposing the ultimate sparkle…and ends up revealing something profound.”  -Raymond Federman, Author of Double or Nothing

    For more info: http://www.monkeypuzzleonline.com and http://www.nancystohlman.net

  • Penny Arcade Reads From BAD REPUTATION

    PArcade_BookCoverWhen asked about her influences, Penny Arcade points to three enduring sources: growing up Southern Italian, immigrant, peasant ,working class in New Britain, Connecticut, the New England factory town that was a center of working class intellectualism, her debut at 17 with the glitter, glam, rock and roll, political, seminal queer, NY theatre, The Playhouse of the Ridiculous which influenced everyone from Bob Fosse and Fellini to Iggy Pop and David Bowie, while a teenage superstar for Andy Warhol’s Factory. No mean feat, they were the two opposing artistic camps that fueled the late 60’s downtown NY art scene and her innate and rampant curiosity, which she claims as her most prominent personality trait. A trait that led the reform school graduate to maintain her oppositional outsiderness without losing her humanity or stunting her intellectual growth.

    Arcade will be reading from her new hard cover book BAD REPUTATION, Semiotext(e) a partial collection of her work, replete with essays on her large body of writing that has earned her the title Queen of Performance around the world. Don’t be surprised you have never heard of her. Arcade is widely thought of as America’s best-kept secret, a unique and stellar voice you won’t soon forget. Long considered the queen of the New York Underground, Arcade is one a handful of 1980’s artists who invented Performance Art (for which she apologizes profusely to everyone) and has performed in venues that don’t normally host underground or performance artists, from Royal Festival Hall to Sydney Opera House to Casa Ruiy in Rio de Janerio. A highly acclaimed writer, poet and performer. “The silver tongued Penny Arcade is a writer of scorching comedic candor with a mind like a steel trap”” raved critic Michael Billington of UK’s Guardian, usually a tough man to please. Her writing is for everyone; direct, poetic with a honed, unique, philosophical point of view, filled with hard won wisdom. You can dine out for a month on her one liner’s alone. Did we mention that Arcade “is a wonder to behold, and manages to entertain, absorb, and broaden the audience simultaneously” and that she is “Provocative, intellectually stimulating, perceptive and hilariously funny and combines the anarchy of Lenny Bruce with the pathos of Judy Garland.” Or as The Scotsman wrote “If Penny Arcade was a cult, I would join!”

    Penny Arcade may well be the most prolific, intelligent performance artist you’ve never seen. Penny Arcade (born Susanna Ventura) is clearly a force to be reckoned with. Her tough, street-wise persona was crafted by junkies, whores, criminals, and “deviants,” and infused with the discipline of the Italian-American working class. Arcade incorporates all of it in her work, and does so with amazing intelligence and a sense of humor. Penny Arcade has never sought the agreement of anyone, nor has she toned down the hard edge of her performances to facilitate mass consumption. Yet she may still have the last laugh. –Bay Area Reporter January 2010

    For more info: http://www.pennyarcade.tv/