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Jonathan Ames reads from his new novel
Wake Up, Sir!
Monday, July 26th, 8:00 PM
FREE
 
Jonathan Ames is the author of I Pass Like Night, The Extra Man, What’s Not to Love?, and My Less Than Secret Life. He is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship for prose fiction, but as a boxer he is a loser — he had a singularly unsuccessful amateur career (0-1), fighting as “The Herring Wonder.” Mr. Ames contributes frequently to Public Radio International’s The Next Big Thing and has been on Late Show with David Letterman more than once, which is nothing to sneeze at.
 
What kind of book has Jonathan Ames written this time? Well, think of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, except that Wake Up, Sir! is not as good. But that’s all right — no book is as good as Don Quixote. You might also think of A Confederacy of Dunces, but there again Ames’s book falls short. I think, though, we might be pushing this humility business too far.
 
Wake Up, Sir! Is the story of Alan Blair, a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He’s very good at problems. He’s also quite skilled at getting into trouble. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet, a wondrously helpful fellow named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his young master
 
Jonathan Ames will read and sign copies of Wake Up, Sir! at the event.
 
More info is at: www.jonathanames.com
 
Monday, July 26th, 8:00 PM
FREE

Lord of the Yum Yum
Friday July 23rd 8PM
Join Lord of the Yum-Yum for an evening of
Vocal Grind Scat Live at Quimby?s
 
Known for strange vocal ruminations and a hilarious live show, Lord of the Yum-Yum promises only the highest quality, most enriching and mind numbing entertainment all at the same time. Lord of the Yum-Yum, aka Paul Velat, combines a guttural scat vocal style, classical/jazz themes, throat singing, improvisation, and electronics to take the modern voice to a new place.
 
Paul Velat is a Former/Current Band member of: Herc., Fleck/Velat, Eric Kmiec Quartet, Six of One Half Summers, Paul Vee and Latchkey Kids, Herbal Flesh Tea. He has also studied with Don Malone, Stacy Garrop, Dan Schaff, Claude Baker, Susan Botti, Patricia Moorehead, Ilya Levinson, Lee Kesselman and Stuart Folse. As a performer, Paul has toured nationally with a concentration on the Midwest and since 1991, he has done many radio and television appearances as well as hundreds of performances around the greater Chicago area.
 
More info is at: www.lordoftheyumyum.com

Quimby?s welcomes the Perpetual Motion Roadshow #12
starring Emily Pohl-Weary, Sonja Ahlers and Jim Munroe.Thursday, May 27th, 8:00pm
 
Perpetual Motion Roadshow #12 features the superhero team-up of the century! Superhero makeovers and more from the contributors to Emily Pohl-Weary’s Girls Who Bite Back! and movie-style trailers for Jim Munroe’s Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask!
 
Emily Pohl-Weary, editor of Kiss Machine and co-author with Judith Merril of the Hugo Award-winning Better to Have Loved: The Life of Judith Merril, puts her unique stamp on the field of speculative fiction and pop culture in this one-of-a-kind anthology of short stories, cultural analysis, comics and artwork. Editor Emily Pohl-Weary, visual artist/writer Sonja Ahlers (Temper, Temper) and other contributors to the anthology Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks will be doing a variety of fun performances.
Check out: http://girlswhobiteback.com
 
Roadshow organizer Jim Munroe is doing a No Media Kings edition of his cult-classic novel Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask, and indie filmmakers have made short movie-style trailers to promote the corporate crime-fighting superheroes novel. They will be shown between the performances.
 
“Jim Munroe has written the first novel to harness the energy, idealism and cartoon inspired playfulness of the new wave of culture jammers. It’s about time we have some superheroes to save us after the post-irony meltdown — forces of corporate darkness, beware.” -Naomi Klein, author No Logo
Check out: http://nomediakings.org/flyboy.htm
 
ALL FOR FREE WOW!!!

Thomas Edwarrd “Eddie” Shaw,bass player in The Monksbook signing event with RoctoberThursday April 29th 8PM
 
Thomas Edwarrd “Eddie” Shaw, bass player in The Monks, the legendary garage band made up of American GI’s based in Germany in the 60s. “The anti-Beatles” are often referred to as the first punk band, and their dark, intense LP “Black Monk Time” is considered one of the greatest albums of all time. Eddie will be signing copies of his critically accclaimed memoir of his days in the band, also titled Black Monk Time (Carson Street Press). He will also be signing his latest book, Beltrami’s River, a historical novel about a visionary amateur explorer. He will also discuss his upcoming book (which he will be in Chicago researching) about his days as a Jazz/Funk fusion musician in the 70s.
 
Jake Austen is the editor of Roctober Magazine and co-producer of Chic-A-Go-Go, Chicago’s longest running, first run, weekly local dance show. The latest issue of Roctober (to be released at this event) is the TV Rock & Roll issue, featuring amongst other things, an interview with Shaw about the monks legendary TV appearances.
In addition to Shaw’s signing and reading, there will also be a projected video of the monks German TV appearances.
 
WOW!!!
more info at www.roctober.com

SPEC Chicago presents Readings from
ROAR MagazineFriday, April 23nd, 4:00 PM
 
SPEC Chicago presents an afternoon of readings featuring students from Jesse Senechal?s ROAR Magazine class at Kelvyn Park High School, Chicago.
 
Readers most likely will include: Isabel Jaimes, Christina Kortuba, Dennys Lucero, Rafael Diaz, Mayra Guitierrez, Alex Chamorro, Daisy Pelayo and Anais Torres.
 
Further information and updates can be found at www.selfpublishers.org

An evening of readings with Mike Smith, Mickey Hess & Andrew WalkerSaturday, July 10th, 7:00 PM
 
Mike Smith is a writer, but makes more by working at libraries and radio stations. Two of his stories have appeared in the Edward Society. He once used his training in English to teach high school Math. Tell Christian I\’m Sorry is his first novel and is loosely based on Smith\’s life, from his Fairdale, Kentucky upbringing to his short-lived teaching career.
 
Mickey Hess lives in Louisville, Kentucky, city of Colonel Sanders\’ grave and the KFC world headquarters. Author of Big Wheel at the Cracker Factory, Nobody Likes a Smartass, and El Cumpleanos de Paco, Mickey is proud to be included in the forthcoming McSweeney\’s Humor Anthology. He teaches writing at Indiana University Southeast.
 
Andrew Walker has performed at places like the University of Louisville and Indiana University Southeast. He attends both of these universities simultaneously and enjoys his studies in writing. His story A Religious Revelation Without the Religion will be featured in the upcoming anthology, Where Handstands Surprise Us: The Best of the Bean Street Reading Series.
 
More info is at: www.mickeyhess.net
www.tellchristian.com
 
FREE

Richard Metzger live in-store
Saturday June 5th 2PM
 
Disinformation co-founder and “wicked warlock” Richard Metzger signs and discusses the company\’s book and DVD releases.
 
A highlight of the afternoon is the screening of rarely seen clips from the infamous “banned” Disinformation TV series, first aired on Channel 4 in the UK and bought for the US by SciFi Network, whose executives panicked once they realized what they had bought and promptly shelved the episodes. The Los Angeles Times described the show as “The Punk Rock 60 Minutes”.
 
Segments include revelations on transsexual glamor chic; Brice Taylor, the alleged “CIA brain-slave” (who claimed Sylvester Stallone made her have sex with dolphins); and the high-tech, alien-connected Montauk Project. Metzger\’s favorite artists, Joe Coleman and Paul Laffoley, were featured, as were segments from the notorious Uncle Goddamn, a mentally challenged and brutally extreme version of Jackass.

Quimby?s welcomesThe Perpetual Motion Roadshow #14
Starring Gavin Grant, Geoffrey Goodwinand, Lisa LadouceurMonday, July 12th, 8:00pm
 
Gavin J. Grant moved from Scotland to the USA in 1991. He worked in bookshops in LA and Boston and then for BookSense.com. He lives in Northampton, MA with his wife, Kelly Link, and is trying to balance freelancing, Small Beer Press, and renovating an old farmhouse. Since 1996 he has published a zine, Lady Churchill?s Rosebud Wristlet. He reviews for BookPage and Xerography Debt and has written for the Hartford Courant, Time Out New York, Scifiction, The Urban Pantheist, Full Unit Hookup, Surgery of Modern Warfare, and .is this a cat? His accent comes through when he reads.
More info is at: http://lcrw.net/lcrw/index.htm
 
Geoffrey H. Goodwin is a sober and decent person, but he’s terrified of reality. Some people go “EeEeEek!” when they see a rodent or a tarantula –and Geoffrey sometimes does that too — but he’s most often left gasping by things that occur in the “real world.” (This is not to say that both rodents and tarantulas are not sometimes considered “real,” but this rapidly devolves into an epic ramble involving semantics, mousetraps and segmented legs.) So, most of all, Geoffrey H. Goodwin performs speculative fiction, strange off-kilter rants that attempt to make the strange, strange world make sense, sense, sense.
More info: http://www.surgeryofmodernwarfare.com/archives/dec2203/dec2203.html
 
Liisa Ladouceur writes poems and reads signs. She was born with one i in Penetanguishene, Ontario a small town famous for its asylum and curlers. She got out with her sanity and her hair crimper and landed in Toronto, where she works as a rock critic/pop culture pundit for papers (eye weekly) and radio (CBC). Recently, her obsession with signs has resulted in a series of poems composed entirely from words photographed in public spaces. She will read these, with accompanying photos, along with new Sign Language poems created in each city of the tour, performed fresh nightly, nicely.
More info is at: http://www.spiderrecords.com/liisa
 

Graphic Novelist Ezra Claytan Daniels reads from
The Changers
Saturday, May 15th, 7:30 PM
 
Join Ezra Claytan Daniels in debuting his new project: The Changers Progress Diary, a full-length Audio CD verbally chronicling the circumstances surrounding and influencing the creation of The Changers, one of the most critically acclaimed sci-fi graphic novels of 2003. From inspiration to insecurity, elation to devastation, and beginning to end, The Changers Progress Diary is a unique and unprecedented step into the mind of the artist. Along with the signing there will also be an original art raffle, a live reading, and special guest Grant Reynolds?author of the comics Orange Dirt & Study Group 12.
 
The Changers is a unique epic of subtle realism that reverentially embraces the conceptual foundations of the Science Fiction genre. The story\’s drama arises from the psychological conflict manifesting between Bisso and Geaza, and the lengths to which each will go to make the other submit. Their positions staked firmly on morally unstable grounds, these are not heroes and villains, but simply people made remarkable by nothing more than the circumstances of their origins – and the emotionally crippling burdens set upon them by those they left behind.
 
Featuring over 45 minutes of original background music, The Changers Progress Diary CD is the centerpiece of a limited edition (500), signed, numbered bundle which also includes both volumes of The Changers miniseries, all bound together in a semi-transparent, high-quality vellum wrap.
 
More info is at: www.dream-chocolate.com

Hunter Kennedy and Jeff Johnson of
the Minus Times read Live at Quimby?s
Sunday, April 25th, 4:30 PM
 
Hunter Kennedy and Jeff Johnson of the Minus Times will be conducting a reading where they will read stories, letters, and personal ads until asked to leave.
 
Jeff Johnson is the contributing editor for the Minus Times as well as a regular contributor to McSweeney\’s and senior editor at Jane Magazine. Hunter Kennedy is an editor and novelist last known to be hiding out in Charleston, South Carolina.
 
The current issue of the Minus Times #28 features:
 
Contributors:
Bell / Berman / deWitt / Foust / Haynes
Johnson / H.Kennedy / T.Kennedy / Laus / Lipsyte
Logan / McKenna / Neely / Rotter / Van Daley
 
plus:
Interview with Stephen Colbert of The Daily Show
 
Mixed tapes from:
Spoon, Califone, Decemberists, Songs: Ohia