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Mary Lynn Reed: Phantom Advances
May 13 @ EST 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Free – $20
In Mary Lynn Reed’s debut short story collection, Phantom Advances, young queer women travel America’s back roads, roaming through the South, Midwest, New York, and California, while questions of gender and identity ride shotgun. Peering through bug-stained windshields and the viewfinders of old film cameras, these wanderers find love, heartbreak, and little pieces of themselves wherever the road takes them. Along the way, their origin stories are also revealed. Boyish girls ace math while mucking horse stalls at a nudist summer camp, and teenage tomboys pool-shark at the family-owned Game Room. In bowling alleys, factories, college-town bars, and gay discos, the stories in Phantom Advances calculate the risks of love, and contemplate the odds of being seen for who you truly are.
“There is so much to love about this book, but it’s Reed’s abiding interest in the slipperiness of identity, the fluid and haphazard dynamics of love and desire, and the way she heads, always, in the direction of generative and electrifying mystery that sets this singular collection apart.” —Maud Casey, author of City of Incurable Women
Mary Lynn Reed is a fiction writer and mathematician. Her fiction has appeared in Fourteen Hills, Colorado Review, South Dakota Review, Potomac Review, Mississippi Review, Free State Review, and elsewhere; and has been honored with the University of Maryland’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and the Per Contra Prize for Short Fiction. A professor of mathematics at Rochester Institute of Technology, she lives in western New York with her wife, the artist Lesley C. Weston. Together they co-edit the journal MoonPark Review.
Mary Lynn Reed will be in conversation with Lindsay Bernal, author of What It Doesn’t Have to Do With (University of Georgia Press, 2018), a winner of the National Poetry Series competition.
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What It Doesn’t Have To Do With
This is a hybrid event held at Writers & Books, 740 University Ave. Rochester, NY, and streamed via Zoom.
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