Saturday, May 8, 2010

Halal Pork & Friends on May 19 8pm @ Happy Ending bar in Lower East Side, Manhattan



Wednesday, May 19
at HAPPY ENDING
302 Broome Street
8pm (doors at 7)

FASTER PUSSYCAT PRESENTS:
Halal Pork & Friends

From surreal anarchist poetry to urban Sufi myths, four UpSet authors read works that have blurred boundaries, broken taboos, and constructed bridges on unstable foundations for the sake of literary luminescence: Cihan Kaan, Nicholas Powers, Matthew Rotando, and Denise Galang.

The Faster Pussycat Reading Series
Faster Pussycat is a renegade, lithe, and loose reading and performance series curated by the Feminist Press. We bring together writers from divergent backgrounds who share an activist spirit. Poets, punks, weirdos, and milquetoasts celebrate new works in all genres.

BIOS:
Denise Galang is a native New Yorker of Filipino descent. She received an MFA at Brooklyn College. Her poetry has been published in Brooklyn Review, Poetry in Performance, and Maganda Literary Journal. Recent projects include her blog, Being Home, a chapbook titled Split Islands, and turning her terrace into an edible garden. Mother to two and teacher to scores of eighth-graders. She subsists on words, bread, family, and some booze.

Cihan Kaan is a Texas-born, Brooklyn-raised writer and filmmaker. His short film She’s Got an Atomic Bomb (2004) won Best Short Film for the Evil City Festival and toured underground film festivals such as the Coney Island Film Festival, the B-Movie Film Festival (winner of the Audience Award), and the Lost Film Festival. His second short film, Shuffle Mode (2006) won Best Short Film at the Sin Cine NYC Erotic Film Festival. His book of short stories, Halal Pork and Other Stories, is forthcoming in Fall 2010 from UpSet Press. He is the first American fiction author of Crimean Tatar descent.

Nicholas Powers is a method writer who uses Lee Strasberg's techniques of affective and sense memory in his writing. He has reported from New Orleans during the flood, U.N. camps in Chad for Darfur refugees, and recently from Haiti after the earthquake. He writes for the Indypendent, teaches literature at SUNY Old Westbury, and has a poetry book, Theater of War (UpSet Press 2005). Currently he is writing a memoir titled The Internal Flood.

Matthew Rotando received an MFA from the City University of New York, Brooklyn College, and a Fulbright Foundation grant. He is a member of POG, a collective of artists and poets in Tucson, Arizona and is an avid rider of an old Italian bicycle. He is the author of The Comeback's Exoskeleton (UpSet Press 2008). Matthew received his Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Arizona and is part of the faculty at Nassau Community College.

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Halal Pork!


In Halal Pork and Other Stories, Cihan Kaan projects an avant garde, post 9/11 world, from the perspective of a young Muslim New Yorker. It's a place where Coney Island meets Mars; where hijabi girls are punk rock dervishes; where identity salesmen count pigeons at insane asylums as a cream cheese conspiracy brews in gitmo; where rich boys pay to be Muslim for a day; where the transgendered are holy; and where the bacon is halal. Kaan offers up five urban Sufi tales in the swirling graffiti of Brooklyn.

Forthcoming Fall 2010


Welcome to the hip and edgy and vibrant world of Halal Pork & Other Stories, a postcolonial feast where, as the title implies, contradictions reign, the figurative is made literal, stolen homelands are bought back and not fought over, and a Coney Island circus star, garbed in a space suit and known for her levitating act, is none other than the prophetess from another planet. These five, witty stories serve up a refreshing crash course on identity, diaspora, dispossession, and on the not-so-distant future full of "alien-human hybrid forms" seeking their "way to a place of solace, grief, or limbo." An impressive debut.

R. Zamora Linmark, The Evolution of a Sigh and Leche


What do you mean you’d never even thought about reading Tatar Turkish Russian Muslim immigrant Brooklyn post-colonial sci-fi punk-rock short fiction before? After you’ve finished Cihan Kaan’s Halal Pork and Other Stories, you’ll realize how ridiculously narrow-minded you must have been. Irreverent, urgent, funny and refreshingly unpredictable, Kaan entertains and instructs in devious and delightful ways.


Moustafa Bayoumi, The Edward Said Reader and How does it Feel to be a Problem: Young and Arab in New York