Reminder: Reading: boneyard by Stephen Beachy at the Booksmith @ Thu Nov 3 7:30pm - 8:30pm (Queer Things)

more details » Reading: boneyard by Stephen Beachy at the Booksmith STEPHEN BEACHY / boneyard http://www.booksmith.com/event/stephen-beachy-boneyard Watch the book trailer: http://youtu.be/3D7st2wA7kw Jake Yoder, a precocious boy caught between Amish culture and the modern world, sits in his sixth-grade classroom writing stories at the behest of a stern but charismatic teacher. Jake's stories feature children who are crushed, imprisoned, and distorted, yet somehow flailing around with a kind of bedazzled awe, trying to find a way out. His characters wander through Amish farms, one-room schoolhouses, South American plains, mental institutions, exotic cities, and prisons; his often haunting and beautiful sentences seem constructed to the beat of an obsessive internal rhythm. The strange logic and disturbing shifts in Jake's tales reveal a young boy processing intense emotional experiences in the wake of his mother's suicide and his own proximity to the schoolroom shootings at Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, in 2006. Jake imagines fantastic journeys, magical transformations, and rock stardom as alternatives, it seems, to his own grim reality and the limitations of his life among the Amish. Novelist Stephen Beachy frames Jake's work with commentary from both himself and his editor, in which they offer their very different views on Amish culture, literary context, the use of psychoactive medications for children, Stephen's own mental health, and the reality of Jake Yoder's unverified existence. "Intelligent cultural critique wrapped in a twisty, turny, funny, damning fairy tale that happened neither long ago nor far away but every day and here." -- Rebecca Brown Stephen Beachy's previous books are Distortion, The Whistling Song, and Some Phantom/No Time Flat. His article in New York Magazine in 2005 exposing JT LeRoy as a fake gained him a cult following of sorts. Beach teaches in the MFA program at USF. Location: Booksmith, 1644 Haight St., SF CA When Thu Nov 3 7:30pm – 8:30pm Pacific Time Calendar Queer Things Who • larrybob@gmail.com - creator

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