Here is what you should see at Bumbershoot if you are going to Bumbershoot today and would like to see something literary:
There is a McSweeney's new fiction showcase at 5:15. It features a couple of writers I wrote about a few months ago in Constant Reader:
The protagonist of Jessica Anthony's debut novel, The Convalescent, couldn't be more unlike the authorial stand-ins who usually play the modern literary hero. Rovar Ăkos Pfliegman is a dwarf who sells meat out of a dilapidated bus that doubles as his home. Pfliegman suffers from an array of crippling physical ailments. He considers a very tall weed growing near his bus to be one of his best friends, and he devotes his spare time to chronicling the long-forgotten branches of his family tree (including "The Great Leg-Wrestling Champion of Tenth-Century Hungary")....
More surprising than Pfliegman, though, is Gary Gray, the main character of James Hannaham's new debut novel, God Says No. An overweight 19-year-old African-American man, Gray is an evangelical Christian who loves to take his brand-new wife to Disney World. He also secretly has sex with anonymous men in public bathrooms. He's the kind of tragic closet case who doesn't even possess a vocabulary to describe his longings.
This is the Saturday Bumbershoot reading you should definitely attend. You can read about all the Bumber-events here.
The full readings calendar, including the next week or so, is here. And if you're planning on staying in and you're looking for personalized book recommendations, feel free to tell me the books you like and ask me what to read next over at Questionland.
