On 21 April, the Fantastic Fiction at KGB Readings Series featured entertaining stories from award-winning fantasy authors Jeffrey Ford and Richard “Rick” Bowes. The Series, hosted by Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel, is held on the third Wednesday evening of each month at the KGB Bar in Manhattan’s East Village. As always, the place was dimly lit, crowded (standing room only, the audience further swelled by authors featured in the anthology The Beastly Bride along with both of the evening’s readers), and noisy (making it a bit of a challenge to carry on conversations). But, of course, one person’s congested is another’s cozy, and the bar is very hospitable to the gathering.
Datlow welcomed the audience and presented Richard Bowes, a World Fantasy, Lambda, International Horror Guild, and Million Writers Award-winning author, and a familiar face at sf readings around the city, in the audience and at the podium both. His experience unabashedly fueled the story that he read, from a forthcoming issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, “Venues”. Compared to the mass exposure of tv and the Internet, Bowes’s narrator quips, for writers “live readings are retail”, before sweeping us along on a wry and delightfully recognizable tour of New York sf readings locales, from New York Review of Science Fiction Readings at (until recently) South Street Seaport (Series executive curator Jim Freund was in the audience), WBAI’s Hour of the Wolf radio show (of which Freund is host), Books of Wonder, Housing Works Café and Bookstore, and, of course, inevitably, the Fantastic Fiction at KGB Readings. The audience, largely populated by writers and editors, hooted with laughter throughout; indeed, Rick could not have hand-picked a more receptive audience or venue. (The haunting of those readings by the ghosts of a small, litigious speculative fiction author and a children’s fantasy writer seemed almost superfluous.)
After a break, series co-host Kressel announced future readers, then introduced the evening’s second guest, World Fantasy, Nebula, and Edgar Allan Poe Award winner Jeffrey Ford, who read his story “Polka Dots and Moonbeams”, an engaging, spooky tale of a couple of souls trapped in the Limbo of a Big Band era nightclub. Once again there was self-reference to the sf community as Ford had “Tuckerized” (that is, used the name of a real person for a fictional character) editor and reviewer Robert K.J. Killheffer (who had won a contest to be so featured, and, fortuitously, the surname nicely suited the sinister fantasy personage on whom it was bestowed), and appreciative chuckles from the audience. (Killheffer, however, was not present.)
At the back of the room, books were available for purchase from volunteers from Bluestockings Bookstore, as were copies of The Beastly Bride.
Ellen Datlow’s pictures of the evening are available in this Flickr set.