On the evening of Tuesday 5 January 2010, the New York Review of Science Fiction Readings Series featured a pair of dark fantasy tales read by Paul Witcover and William Shunn. As part of the Series’ 20th season celebration, past curator Amy Goldschlager returned to present the evening’s readers and to reminisce. The event was held at the NYRSF Readings Series’ current venue, the 5th floor of the South Street Seaport Museum, 12 Fulton Street in Manhattan. It was the Series’ penultimate presentation at this site for the time being, due to renovations. The readings from March through May will be held at the Soho Galllery for Digital Art.
After welcoming the audience and briefly announcing upcoming readings (and promising something special for June, when he will again curate) the Series’ executive curator Jim Freund, host of WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf radio program on sf and fantasy, turned things over Goldschlager, its fourth curator (1997-99). As has become traditional for returning past curators, Amy took a moment to reminisce before introducing the evening’s first reader, Paul Witcover (himself also a former curator).
Witcover read from an upcoming, unsold novel with a seasonal setting, Mistletoe. A sprig of the magical titular herb inexplicably appears in a North Pole elven labor camp, whose brutal, big-bellied commandant’s naughty list doesn’t get lumps of coal in their stockings, but fed to his hellish black flying steed (talk about Bad Santa), and from which a political prisoner plots escape.
After a break, Amy introduced the second and final reader of the evening, Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Award nominee Bill Shunn (who came in from Chicago). Shunn read the second quarter of the short novel Cast a Cold Eye, co-authored with Canadian writer Darrell Murphy. In the downright spooky story (relieved by an occasional chuckle), set in rural Nebraska in 1921, a 15-year-old with a touch of the otherworldly becomes apprentice to a one-eyed spirit photographer whose camera suddenly captures reality beneath ours. (A metaphor likened the forming of images on photographic plates to those of ghosts drawn out of their invisible realm.)
The audience of about 40 included Paul Berger, Richard Bowes, Ken Ficara, Harold Garber, N.K. Jemison, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Rajan Khanna, and Gordon Linzner. Afterward, as customary, the guests and a number of audience members adjourned to a nearby pub for dinner and conversation.