I’m returning to the City of Roses for one of the country’s best book festivals. I’m so fucking excited.

Nowhere to Hide: Pitch-Black Humor

In Ryan Chapman’s Riots I Have Known, an unnamed Sri Lankan inmate barricades himself inside the prison computer lab while a riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in the prison literary journal that he edits. As he awaits inevitable violence, he is determined to share his life story. Chuck Klosterman’s Raised in Captivity one of the most original and exciting story collections in recent memory, a fever graph of our deepest unvoiced hopes, fears and preoccupations. Ceaselessly inventive, hostile to corniness in all its forms, and mean only to the things that really deserve it. And Kimberly King Parsons’s debut story collection, Black Light, was praised as “grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush” by Carmen Maria Machado. The stories in Black Light are enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental on everything from first love to addiction. Moderated by Sarah Rothenfluch.