In keeping with the family theme of the December holidays season, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings on the evening of Tuesday, 2 December 2008 was a special program featuring a couple of couples, newlyweds Sarah Langan and J.T. Petty, and Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. The event was produced by the Series’ executive curator Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy, and presented at the NYRSF Readings Series’ venue at the South Street Seaport Museum’s Melville Gallery.
Regrettably, Petty, a writer and director of movies, videogames, books, and graphic novels, was unable to attend as he was home sick with the flu; however, the family theme held as Langan is in a family way, and was, of course, accompanied to the podium by her fetus. A holiday theme was also sort of kept as she read a Halloween-themed story, “The Great Pumpkin Arrives At Last”. (Well, Halloween is a holiday.) While Langan, a Bram Stoker Award-winning author, described the story as “campy”, taking its title from the Peanuts cartoon airing on tv in the background, I found the tale of a woman who could talk to the dead and her guy’s severely dysfunctional relationship with his brother, now dead, veering between cute and creepy, yet captivating nonetheless.
After a recess, Kushner and Sherman, whose 1996 marriage is “happily” now recognized in New York, read in alternation from The Fall of the Kings, a fantasy of manners, which they wrote in collaboration. Their lengthy selection was set, appropriately, during a winter holiday season (Midwinter Festival) in a nameless city, with action shifting between a university, with those scenes read by Sherman (“a recovering academic”), and a family holiday dinner party at a ducal residence, with Kushner—like Freund, a radio host—scurrying up to read from those pages. She confessed afterward that full appreciation of characters and incidents (and in-jokes) depended on familiarity with prior books in the series, Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword (both authored solo by Kushner). Kushner went on to plug her New York stage debut in the Vital Theatre’s new adaptation of The Klezmer Nutcracker, based on her radio special/CD/book, The Golden Dreydl, neatly concluding the evening’s holiday theme.
The audience of more than 35 included Richard Bowes, Harold Garber, Barbara Krasnoff, Josh Kronengold, Gordon Linzner, Jon Messinger, Lisa Padol, Robert Rodriguez, and Veronica Schanoes. Afterward, as customary, the guests and a number of audience members (totaling more than 30) adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner.
Happy holidays.
[Editor’s note: Freund adds: “Historically, it may be of interest that Delia and Ellen had read at NYRSF from that work before, when the series was hosted at Dixon Place and Amy Goldschlager was the curator.”
Goldschlager clarifies: “They read from the original novella, ‘The Fall of the Kings’, on 16 July 1997 as part of the Bending the Landscape: Fantasy reading (the novella had been published in that anthology). Rick Bowes also read his contribution to that anthology that night.”]