#outpost19

When I read the advance copy of What Becomes Us, I asked Micah Perks if I could (please) organize her Los Angeles book launch as part of readings. I did this for two main reasons.

One: Micah is one of my writing mentors. Of course I want to celebrate her in Los Angeles, the city I love. She is the professor and co-director of the writing program at UC Santa Cruz and since she lives in Santa Cruz, Micah is rarely in Los Angeles. I’d love for you all to come out and celebrate her and her book because you are part of the reason I think so fondly about this city.

Two: her new novel What Becomes Us is funny and well-written and dark and fascinating. I’m not alone in being captivated by this story. Many have praised her book and here are two of them:

“Micah Perks is one of the most radiantly original writers around. What Becomes Us, exhilarating and terrifying, is a novel I love for its wild beauty, its offbeat inventiveness, it’s effervescent language, and the artfulness with which it has been shaped. This is a brilliant novel.”

- Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen, longlisted for The National Book Award for Fiction.

"Micah Perks' book has everything a reader could hope for -- her language is lively, her characters appealing. Set in a storied landscape, with themes of independence and community. Romance! History! Food! Plus a tale to tell and some surprising people to tell it. There is real magic here. Micah magic! Completely original, completely delightful."

- Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

A bit more about her: 

MICAH PERKS is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here, a memoir, Pagan Time, and a long personal essay, Alone In The Woods: Cheryl Strayed, My Daughter and Me. Her short stories and essays have won five Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, The Toast, OZY and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. Excerpts of What Becomes Us won a National Endowment for The Arts grant and The New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University and now lives with her family in Santa Cruz. http://www.micahperks.com/

I’ve been a long-time admirer of Michelle Tea’s writing and delighted she’ll take part in the Los Angeles Book Launch of What Becomes Us by Micah Perks.

Micah told me that she is always thrilled to be in the presence of Michelle Tea. She said, “I am deeply in love with her new book, Black Wave, an apocalyptic, experimental memoir. It's smart, funny, sad, revolutionary, it's the end of memoir as we know it. I want to teach it, I want to take my bullhorn, which I own, climb up on my rooftop, and order everyone to love it immediately. "

Both Michelle and Micah have written and spoken about the complicated labor of maternity and artistic practice. They’re both brilliant writers and feminists and their discussion on Wednesday October 5th is sure to be lively and thought-provoking. Also, funny. They both make me laugh. And they'll make you laugh, too.

me: "A Moody Fellow Finds Love And Then Dies. Its about a moody fellow named Moody Fellow who finds love then apparently dies. I haven't gotten that far yet though."

"Don't take this the wrong way but that's exactly the kind of book I'd imagine you reading"

"What are you reading?"

me: "A Moody Fellow Finds Love And Then Dies. Its about a moody fellow named Moody Fellow who finds love then apparently dies. I haven't gotten that far yet though."

"Don't take this the wrong way but that's exactly the kind of book I'd imagine you reading"

My novel Understudies comes out today. I love this book dearly, and I hope you'll consider checking it out. It's available for purchase through most retailers, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Outpost19 (free shipping!), Powell's, Kobo, IndieBound.

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  "Funny, moving, perceptive, artful—these are the first words that came to mind when I tried to describe Understudies to a friend. And then, to better capture its spirit, I began reading it aloud and marveled all over again at Ravi Mangla’s ability to tell us, with precision and wit, what deserves to be known.”   (Joanna Scott)

  "Ravi Mangla’s delightingly tight, micro-chaptered Understudies is an unassumingly beautiful and moving debut. It’s elegantly and hilariously precise about everything it touches, and it touches almost everything human.”  (Gary Lutz)

  "Ravi Mangla’s Understudies is a brilliant meditation on the private cost of celebrity, the longing to transcend the ordinary, and the seductive nature of performance. Darkly funny, sharply-observed, and terrifically moving, Understudies is an essential debut.”  (Laura van den Berg)

  "With the absurdist realism of A.M. Homes and the perverse randomness of Miranda July, Ravi Mangla’s Understudies asks ‘is the unacknowledged life worth living,’ and—in a prose as original as the novel itself—answers, definitively, yes.”  (Courtney Maum)