February 6, 2017, 7:30pm. Buy tickets here. At the Goethe Institut, 5750 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. Parking under building $2 after 6:00 pm. Enter from Wilshire and Courtyard Drive.
Ticket: $20.
Could Michael Tolkin’s new novel be the first new fiction on the Trump Era? Imagine a world, in Los Angeles specifically, where the elites are wiped out, where cataclysmic international accidents prompt a harrowing revolution in the streets of Hollywood. Take heart, people– we’re in Michael Tolkin’s hands, so it’s satirical, dark and funny.
The Player and The Return of the Player defined Michael Tolkin as the modern chronicler of Hollywood, novels which illuminate Hollywoods power to lure and willingness to betray. Packed with black humor, and treachery to spare, those novels became classics, seeping into several genres at once. With his new novel, NK3, Tolkin moves to new ground–a dystopic view of the immediate future whose serious subject matter still crackles with his biting humor and brilliant observation of humanity often savage, often good– as we compete and attempt to regain what we’ve lost. In NK3, what we’ve lost to a North Korean biological weapon accident, is individual and thus collective memory. One of the great joys of this book is that Michael Tolkin retains his passion for pop culture and Hollywood satire, and laces NK3, a novel of surviving disaster in Los Angeles, with his signature dark wit, and immensely powerful social observation.
Chris Kraus is an artist and author of the cult novel, I Love Dick, a book whose appreciation has grown steadily for the past 20 years. I Love Dick has also become a much discussed show on Amazon television, directed by Transparent creator Jill Solloway. Note that I Love Dick is about a married woman, whose name is Chris Kraus, who obsessively loves a culture critic named Dick. A recent subject of a profile in The New Yorker, and a rave review of her novels in The New Yorker just a year before that, Chris Kraus is an author whose books continue to attract readers and followers, commentary and adulation, years after publication. She has emerged as a literary avatar for women readers and writers.