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Lori Wallach discusses her new book Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO
Thursday, April 22nd, 7:30 PM
 
“A crucial guide – devastating and highly readable. Wallach and Woodall are warriors for democracy against its most powerful opponents.”
-Naomi Klein Author No Logo & Fences and Windows
 
Globalization affects our lives every day in myriad ways-often for the worse. Yet, as this eye-opening expos? documents, the current terms of corporate-led globalization are not inevitable: they are merely one option being imposed by the powerful, secretive, and profoundly undemocratic World Trade Organization.
 
Whose Trade Organization? A Comprehensive Guide to the WTO is the definitive guide to the WTO. It reveals which World Trade Organization policies have led to U.S. job losses, the race to the bottom in wages, unsafe food, attacks on long-standing environmental and health laws, and burgeoning international inequality. Want to know why the WTO attracts such passionate protests all over the world? This book explains the lopsided agreements and secret tribunals that are the WTO?s stock in trade. Public Citizen advocates Wallach and Woodall carefully document the World Trade Organization\’s appalling nine-year track record with riveting case-by-case accounts.
 
Lori Wallach is the Director of Global Trade Watch, a division of the Nader-founded Public Citizen. A leading expert on trade issues, she has been called “brainy” by The Nation, “savvy” by Business Week, “scrappy” by the Miami Herald and “Ralph Nader with a sense of humor” by the Wall Street Journal. Wallach has testified as a trade lawyer on NAFTA, GATT-WTO, and other trade issues before over 30 U.S. congressional committees, numerous other countries? legislatures, the U.S. International Trade Commission and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. She has served as a trade commentator on CNN, ABC, CNBC, C-SPAN, All Things Considered, and The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.

Robert Jensen discusses his new book Citizens of the Empire
Thursday, June 17th, 7:30 PM
 
As we approach the elections of 2004, U.S. progressives are faced with the challenge of how to confront our unresponsive and apparently untouchable power structures. With millions of anti-war demonstrators glibly dismissed as a \”focus group,\” and with the collapse of political and intellectual dialogue into slogans and imperatives used to stifle protest ? \”Support the Troops,\” \”We Are the Greatest Nation On Earth,\” etc. ? a state of hopelessness and cynicism can become overwhelming.
 
In a plainspoken deconstruction of the dominant political rhetoric ?intentionally crafted to depress political discourse and activism ?, Citizens of the Empire probes deeply into the sense of disempowerment that has resulted from the Left?s inability to halt the violent and repressive course of post-9/11 U.S. policy. In this passionate and very personal exploration of what it means to be a citizen of the world?s most powerful, affluent, and militarized nation in an era of imperial expansion, Jensen reveals the contradictions and falsehoods of the prevailing myths by using common-sense analogies that provide the reader with a clear-thinking rebuttal and a way to move forward with progressive political work and discussions.
 
Robert Jensen is a professor of media law, ethics and politics at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream, among other books. He also writes for popular media, appears on syndicated talk shows regularly– including The O\’Reilly Factor with Bill O\’Reilly, and his opinion and analytic pieces on foreign policy, politics and race have appeared in papers and magazines throughout the United States.
 
More info at: http://www.citylights.com/CLpubRE.html#citizens
FREE

Walking the Edge of Insanity:
Navigating the World of Mental Health with Open Eyes and Important Questions.
An Evening with The Icarus Project
Thursday April 8th 8PM
 
As folks who generally feel alienated by mainstream culture and question conventional ideas of sanity, what does it mean to be struggling with traditional labels such as ?clinical depression,? ?bipolar disorder,? or ?schizophrenia?? How helpful is the modern medical view of mental disorders that revolves around drugs and psychiatry and how much of it is influenced by powerful pharmaceutical corporations, public funding cuts, and a society that equates economic productivity with health?
 
Come join an exciting discussion that is starting all over the country and is being orchestrated by Sascha Scatter and Ashley McNamara, the directors of The Icarus Project ? a group of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder who are finding new language for all the different experiences that get labeled ?mental illness.?
Come celebrate the release of our little book, Navigating the Space Between Brilliance and Madness: a Reader and Roadmap of Bipolar Worlds, which is a compilation of stories and lessons from brave and misunderstood folks who rarely have the chance to speak and whose insights are going to end up changing the world.
 
Ashley McNamara is an artist, writer, farmer, dreamer, traveler, teacher and mental health activist diagnosed with bipolar disorder who has been roaming around the country putting together zines and editing a book for The Icarus Project. These days her most accurate address is the license plate of her truck, but before taking off for the great wide open with a horde of art supplies and lots of good food she was known to live in the San Francisco Bay Area and grow exceptional lettuce.
 
Sascha Altman DuBrul (aka Sascha Scatter) is a writer and activist who grew up in the New York City squatter subculture and spent years playing in punk bands, riding freight trains, working on farms, and writing political adventure stories about his travels from the forests blockades of the Pacific Northwest to the jungles of Southern Mexico. Sascha has been locked up in psych wards involuntarily three times for losing his mind and is diagnosed classic ?Bipolar I with psychotic tendencies,? which in his mind doesn?t quite capture the essence of the dilemma, but he?s working on creating new and better language to talk about it.
 
for more info check out www.theicarusproject.net

An Evening with the Blithe House Quarterly
Friday, June 18th, 7:00 PM
 
Join host: Aldo Alvarez, executive editor and publisher, Blithe House Quarterly as he presents a reading of short fiction by authors appearing in the all-Chicago Summer issue of Blithe House Quarterly, an online journal of LGBT short fiction. Event readers Include: Dave Awl, Kurt Heintz, Karen Lee Osborne, K.R. Randen and Yvonne Zipter
 
Aldo Alvarez is the author of Interesting Monsters: Fictions. Aldo founded Blithe House Quarterly in 1997 and currently serves as its Executive Editor and Publisher.
 
Dave Awl is the author of What the Sea Means: Poems, Stories and Monologues 1987-2002. He is the founder of The Pansy Kings performance group and a ten-year veteran of The Neo-Futurists\’ fringe theater smash Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind.
 
Kurt Heintz is a writer, performer, and new media artist whose output grows from contemporary video art, performance poetry, poetry video, and electronic literature. He is
founder of the e-poets network.
 
Karen Lee Osborne is the author of the novels Carlyle and Hawkwings the editor of The Country of Herself: Short Fiction by Chicago Women and coeditor, with William Spurlin, of Reclaiming the Heartland: Lesbian and Gay Voices from the Midwest
 
KR Randen is a 24 year old writer living in Chicago, IL. While short stories are his mainstay, he performs on stage; most recently at the Queer is Folk Festival.
 
Yvonne Zipter is the author of the nonfiction books Ransacking the Closet and Diamonds Are a Dyke\’s Best Friend, the nationally syndicated column \”Inside Out,\” and the critically acclaimed poetry collection The Patience of Metal.
 
Blithe House Quarterly was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award in 2000. The GLAAD Media Award recognizes the \”fairness, accuracy, quality, originality and impact of media representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community\”.
Check them out on-line at: www.blithe.com
FREE

The 2nd Hand celebrates the release of issue #13
Live at Quimby?s
 
The following is a direct transmission for the editors of The 2nd Hand:
 
For Apes, By Apes
 
Between adopting new exercise routines and trying to ignore the empty vessel on television, we have managed the 13. You know you want it. Join The 2nd Hand (www.the2ndhand.com) at Quimby?s on Thursday, March 18 at 7:30 pm to celebrate the release of The 2nd Hand broadside number 13, featuring: new fiction (I hadn’t slept like a normal human being for months.) by John L. Sheppard (from our 27th state); our co-conspirator Mickey Hess (Late at night where there used to be static, and I said two-for-one on wheels and rims and we’ll throw in mudflaps too) from Louisville-a town we will always cherish for giving the world Slint; and Chicago’s Erika Mikkalo (Someone outside the circle shouted, “I can play taps on a tuba!”).
 
Helping us celebrate are: resident 2nd Hand weather poet Susannah Felts; Gretchen Kalwinski, who seems to understand much about the nature of waiting; and your dear 2nd Hand editors, Todd Dills (author of For Weeks Above the Umbrella) and Jeb Gleason-Allured (author of his own despair).
 
BYOB. You heard us.

Nikki Pill reads from her novel Singing and Then at Quimby?s
March 27th 7:00PM
 
A unique and experimental novel, Singing, and Then explores the realms of Earth, Heaven and Hell from the perspective of angels, mortal men and the Prince of Lies himself.
 
A new angel inexplicably appears in Heaven. At the same time all the souls in Heaven, Hell and Earth disappear. While Heaven searches for the lost souls, two damaged spirits wander the Earth. Angels, spirits and mortal men combine forces in a surprising chain of events. They uncover an ugly conspiracy: innocent angels imprisoned, a mysterious illness that devours those closest to God, and a plot to start a second war between Heaven and Hell.
 
Nikki M. Pill graduated from Lake Forest College with a bachelors’ degree in English and Philosophy. She names Jeanette Winterson, William Faulkner, Steven Brust, and Neil Gaiman as her biggest literary influences, and hopes that all the Sartre she read isn\’t counteracting them too much. Nikki is also widely known and admired as the Vipe Girl, creator of Vipe.org, a feminist web site that critiques our culture’s unrealistic beauty standards.
 
Singing and Then is her first published novel, and she is currently working on her second, as well as collaborating on a screenplay with the inimitable Bob Cappel.
 
More info is at: www.singingandthen.com

The Danny’s Reading Series welcomes
Poets Matthew Zapruder, Matt Rohrer and Joshua Beckman to Quimby’s for a night of poetry
Friday April 16th 8PM
 
Matthew Zapruder is the author of American Linden, winner of the 2001 Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. Matt Rohrer is the author of Hummock in the Malookas (winner National Poetry Series, published by Norton), Satellite (Verse Press) and the forthcoming A Green Light (Verse Press); he is the poetry editor of Fence. Joshua Beckman is the author of Things Are Happening (winner of the APR Honickman Award, published by Copper Canyon), Something I Expected to be Different (Verse Press) and the forthcoming Your Time Has Come (Verse Press). Rohrer and Beckman are also the authors of a collaborative book of poems, Nice Hat: Thanks (Verse Press), as well as an accompanying compact disk, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (Verse Press).
 
This reading is part of the midwest tour to support the new books from Matt Roher and Joshua Beckman. They will also sign copies of their books.
 
More info is at:www.versepress.orgwww.tupelopress.org

Jarret Keene, poet, Monster FashionRyan G. Van Cleave, poet, The Magical Breasts of Britney SpearsSeth Flynn Barkan, poet, Blue Wizard Is About to Die!Friday March 26th 7:30PM
 
Jarret Keene & Ryan G. Van Cleave read from their new poetry collections
Pop-culture poets Jarret Keene (Monster Fashion) and Ryan G. Van Cleave return to Quimby’s to read from their latest poetry collections. Ryan G. Van Cleave’s, new collection is entitled The Magical Breasts of Britney Spears. This evening will also feature Seth Flynn Barkan author of the new book of videogame poetry, Blue Wizard
Is About to Die!
 
Check out:
www.manicdpress.comwww.jarretkeene.comwww.ryangvancleave.com

Comics artist Paul Hornschemeier, the author of Mother Come Home,
celebrates the release of Forlorn Funnies #5 with animated videos at Quimby?s.
Friday March 19th 8PM
 
Paul Hornschemeier is the creator of the Harvey, Ignatz, and Eisner nominated Forlorn Funnies, as well as the recently published “Mother, Come Home” collection from Dark Horse. Reared in a small farming town in southern Ohio, Paul now lives and works in Chicago. His work has also appeared in the Chicago Reader, Alarm, Sound Collector Audio Review, Friction, The Common Review, Project Telstar, Autobiographix, as well as various CD and 7″ covers and posters.
 
For this event there will be a showing of short animated videos based on Paul’s cartoons, followed by a brief question and answer session. The event will conclude with Paul signing his collection, Mother, Come Home, as well as the new 80-page Forlorn Funnies 5, which makes its debut at the beginning of March.

Soft Skull & FC2 authors read Thursday March 25th 7:30PM
 
An evening of readings featuring:Ben Greenman, Daniel Nester and Clayton Eshleman & FC2 Authors
further details tba
 
Soft Skull Authors:
Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker; his work has appeared there as well as in Nerve, McSweeneys, The Paris Review, Mississippi Review, Elysian Fields, and elsewhere. Most recently his work appeared in the acclaimed McAdam/Cage anthology Politically Inspired. He has ghostwritten for Gene Simmons and Simon Cowell, amongst others, and once won a car in a rock ?n? roll trivia bowl. Born in Chicago, he grew up in Florida and now lives in Brooklyn, NY.
 
Daniel Nester is a poet, editor, and teacher who lives in Brooklyn, NY. His work has appeared in such journals as Open City, Nerve, Mississippi Review, and in The Best American Poetry2003. He is the editor in chief of the online literary journal Unpleasant Event Schedule , former editor in chief of La Petite Zine, and contributing editor of Painted Bride Quarterly.
 
Clayton Eshleman:
 
FC2 Authors:
Brian Evenson is the author of six books of fiction, most recently The Wavering Knife. He teaches Creative Writing at Brown University. He will be reading from “The Installation.”
 
Lucy Corin’s short stories have appeared in many literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and Fiction International, and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South: The Year’s
Best and FC2’s Chick-Lit2 (No Chic Vics). She will be reading from her first novel, Everyday
Psychokillers: A History for Girls.
 
A.B. West lives in Belgium, where she has worked with the avant-garde theater company, Th??tre Laboratoire Vicinal. She performed and collaborated on the original plays Tramp, Lunapark and Chaman Hooligan. She was the director and sole actress of the play “I” which toured worldwide. West has also been an agent, an editor with Wall Street Journal Europe, a free-lance translator and a copywriter. Wakenight Emporium has been accepted for publication in France as Figurations Lumi?res. She will be reading from Wakenight Emporium.
 
more info at http://fc2.org