Stephen Elliott & Michelle Orange Reading & Signing October 26, 2006

We're pleased to present the winner of the 2006 HOBART minibook contest, Michelle Orange! Ms. Orange has written for Salon, The Sun Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle and others. She is a frequent contributor to McSweeney's. Her most recent work can be found in The Best Sex Writing 2006 and Mountain Man Dance Moves. Her radio work has aired on the CBC and BBC and can be found on the Peabody award-winning site Transom.org. She recently edited a story collection to be found in Issue 22 of McSweeney's.

In the Spring of 2003, Canadian writer Michelle Orange boarded a plane bound for Italy. The Sicily Papers is a series of letters she wrote while traveling alone throughout the region. Though originally meant to reassure an anxious correspondent, over time the letters, both high-spirited and frank, searching and satisfied, grew into something larger than the sum of their parts: a love letter to Italy, to an uncertain future, and to the lost art of letter writing itself.

Fiction or memoir? Stephen Elliott�s blistering new collection, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, inhabits a mysterious area in between. As with all his work, these stories have the raw ring of truth filtered through Elliott�s downbeat poetic sensibility. No subject is too controversial, no image too taboo to put to paper in these brilliant first-person narratives. Acclaimed by the New York Times, Elliott here confirms his status as a major young writer of a kind of literary fiction that recalls the work of Genet and Bukowski.

Official Website: http://www.readingfrenzy.com