Jami Attenberg

Joshua Ferris, author of "The Unnamed," and Jami Attenberg, author of "The Melting Season," read from their new works.

We are really looking forward to this event!
Watch the trailer for Kept Man
The Short Story:Jami Attenberg has written about sex, technology, design, graphic novels, books, television, and urban life for Jane, Print, New York, Nylon, Radar, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, Salon, ... (more)Plenty, Nextbook, Time Out NY, eWeek, and others. Her fiction has been published by Nerve, Pindeldyboz, Spork, and Bullfight Review. She recently appeared in the anthologies Sex for America, Future Misbehavior and Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone. Her debut collection of stories, INSTANT LOVE, was published by Crown/Shaye Areheart Books in June 2006. THE KEPT MAN was published by Riverhead Books in January 2008. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. The long version: Jami believes in the power and importance of independent publishing and self-publication, whether online or in print. She has been published by a number of zines, and her chapbook, DELI LIFE, was published by Austin upstart So New Media in 2003. INSTANT LOVE was originally a zine series which she sold primarily on her website, whatever-whenever.net. Her site has been in existence in various forms since 1998. Jami has lived in the following cities: Buffalo Grove, IL (where she established herself amongst her peers as "the kind of girl who wears black a lot" and "always has her head in a book" and is "kind of cranky."); Ithaca, NY (summer school program for geeks, in case you hadn't figured out she was a geek yet); Baltimore, MD (where she got a degree from Johns Hopkins University in Writing Seminars); Norwich, UK (where she smoked a lot of hash); Fairfax, VA (where she worked as a hostess at a Ruby Tuesday's in a mall); Tampa, FL (where she bartended at a lesbian bar on Pass-A-Grille Beach and worked on a NOW march); Washington, DC (where she waited tables at Polly's Cafe on U Street and lived for a six months in a room that had a gigantic hole in the floor); Seattle, WA (where she worked in a nursing home and performed awful erotic poetry in cafes); the East Village of New York City (interactive advertising work, eight years and counting); Napa, CA (where she wrote INSTANT LOVE), and finally Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. So if you think you've met her before, you're probably right.

We are really looking forward to this event!
Watch the trailer for Kept Man
The Short Story:Jami Attenberg has written about sex, technology, design, graphic novels, books, television, and urban life for Jane, Print, New York, Nylon, Radar, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, Salon, ... (more)Plenty, Nextbook, Time Out NY, eWeek, and others. Her fiction has been published by Nerve, Pindeldyboz, Spork, and Bullfight Review. She recently appeared in the anthologies Sex for America, Future Misbehavior and Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone. Her debut collection of stories, INSTANT LOVE, was published by Crown/Shaye Areheart Books in June 2006. THE KEPT MAN was published by Riverhead Books in January 2008. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. The long version: Jami believes in the power and importance of independent publishing and self-publication, whether online or in print. She has been published by a number of zines, and her chapbook, DELI LIFE, was published by Austin upstart So New Media in 2003. INSTANT LOVE was originally a zine series which she sold primarily on her website, whatever-whenever.net. Her site has been in existence in various forms since 1998. Jami has lived in the following cities: Buffalo Grove, IL (where she established herself amongst her peers as "the kind of girl who wears black a lot" and "always has her head in a book" and is "kind of cranky."); Ithaca, NY (summer school program for geeks, in case you hadn't figured out she was a geek yet); Baltimore, MD (where she got a degree from Johns Hopkins University in Writing Seminars); Norwich, UK (where she smoked a lot of hash); Fairfax, VA (where she worked as a hostess at a Ruby Tuesday's in a mall); Tampa, FL (where she bartended at a lesbian bar on Pass-A-Grille Beach and worked on a NOW march); Washington, DC (where she waited tables at Polly's Cafe on U Street and lived for a six months in a room that had a gigantic hole in the floor); Seattle, WA (where she worked in a nursing home and performed awful erotic poetry in cafes); the East Village of New York City (interactive advertising work, eight years and counting); Napa, CA (where she wrote INSTANT LOVE), and finally Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY. So if you think you've met her before, you're probably right.

Jami Attenberg has written for Jane, Print, Salon, Nylon, The San Francisco Chronicle, Nextbook, and Time Out New York. Her fiction has appeared in Nerve, Pindeldyboz, Spork, and Bullfight Review.In her novel, The Kept Man, Jarvis Miller’s artist husband has been in a coma for six years. And so, Jarvis ... (more)has spent these years suspended between hope and grief, paralyzed with longing for a life and a marriage that are slipping away. But then, unexpectedly, Jarvis makes her first new friends in years when she meets the Kept Man Club: three men whose lifestyles are funded by their successful wives, who gather once a week on laundry day. With their help, she reawakens to the city beyond her Brooklyn apartment, past the pitying eyes of her husband’s art dealer and his irresponsible best friend as her future begins to take on the irresistible tingles of possibility for the first time in almost a decade. When a shocking discovery casts a different light on her idealized marriage, she’s propelled even further down a path that she would never have dared to imagine just months before. Tender, bold, and unabashed, The Kept Man is a compulsively readable novel about love and loss from one of our most dynamic new storytellers.

Moderator: Amy Sayre-Roberts

Panelists: Jami Attenberg, Amy Guth, Kelly McMasters, Megan Stielstra

Moderator: Leah Jones

Panelists: Jami Attenberg, Jason Behrends, Amy Guth, others TBA