KGB Bar

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This Week:
Maxine Swann reads from her novel forthcoming: The Foreigners
Aaron Hamburger reads from a story: In Hiding
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Maxine Swann’s critically acclaimed first novel, Serious Girls, was selected for the Booksense 76 List, and was published internationally in Dutch and Spanish. She is the author of Flower Children. Her short fiction has been published in Ploughshares and Open City, and on nerve.com.  Her literary prizes include the Ploughshares’ Cohen Award, the O. Henry Award, and the Pushcart Prize.  In March 2008, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Swann the 2008 Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award to honor the exceptional quality of her prose style. Aside from her work in fiction, she is a translator, screenwriter, and teacher who lives in Buenos Aires and New York City.  She reads from her novel forthcoming: The Foreigners

Praise for Flower Children “Writing in lucid, crystalline prose…[Swann] captures the incongruities of the 1970s counterculture as seen from the point of view of a young child, the shifting attitudes the narrator and her three siblings take toward the adult world as they slip-slide from childhood into adolescence, and the incalculable ways in which the passage of time colorizes the past.”—The NY Times
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Aaron Hamburger was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome for his short story collection THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD. His novel FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, Poets and Writers, Details, Nerve, Out, The Forward, and Time Out New York. He has won a fellowship from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, as well as first place in the David J. Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers, and has taught creative writing at Columbia University. He reads from his story: In Hiding

Praise for Faith For Beginners “As the Michaelsons endure “Millenium Marathon 2000,” a prepackaged trip through the Holy Land in air-conditioned buses, the sadder, grimmer sides of Israel slowly overwhelm both them and Jeremy’s new lover. The novel is consistently amusing, particularly when Hamburger offers barbed observations about the banalities of tourist culture.”
-- The New York Times

About the Series: KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction

The KGB Bar Sunday Night Fiction showcases the finest in contemporary fiction from new and emerging writers.

Suzanne Dottino/fiction curator,