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Wednesday, August 12, 7pm NEW PROSE SERIES  Chicago-based writer and critic Spencer Dew is the author of Songs of Insurgency, editor of the web-based publication Religion and Culture Web Forum, a regular reviewer for Rain Taxi Review of Books, and a frequent contributor to Chicago Artists' News. His fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in scores of publications. Songs of Insurgency is a timely—and occasionally unsettling—volume of short stories. And within its pages is a woman who erases lines in history textbooks, painting over horror after horror with a liquid paper brush . . . a groundskeeper who fishes yet another body out of a lake at a suicide camp . . . a man who scans through radio channels late at night, longing for the fulfillment of apocalyptic fantasy . . . a driver who heads ever westward—highway after highway, motel after motel—the details of each locale eerily similar. Songs of Insurgency gives us a patchwork view of the post-9/11 zeitgeist, presenting a world—ours—in the process of being dismantled. Fear segues to paranoia; and alienation to sadism or suicide or a droning, dial-tone numbness. Yet amidst all this dislocation and unease, just audible above the fake moans of the phone sex line, a vison of an authentic alternative existence tests its wings. Greg Gerke lives in Buffalo. His work has or will appear in Rosebud, Fourteen Hills, Pedestal Magazine, Pindeldyboz, Flash Forward Press 2009 Anthology and others. There's Something Wrong With Sven, a book of short fiction has been published by Blaze Vox Books. His website is www.greggerke.com  In this group of flash fiction and short stories Greg Gerke looks at the world with a sometimes absurd, sometimes tragic, but entirely compassionate eye. Two cars crash but the drivers turn out to be a cyclist who witnessed the accident, a son is visited by his dead father, a single Rainier cherry is used as a football in a scrimmage between potheads and in the hilarious title story a 1000-pound moth is nearing the end of his days. |