City Lights is hosting a launch party for our newest book, The Brick House by Micheline A. Marcom tomorrow at 7 pm. Refer to their event web page for more information.
Micheline will be in discussion with Rikki Ducornet.
Copies of the book can be purchased at the event. If you are unable to attend the party, the book can be purchased at SPD Books, Amazon, at your local independent bookstore, or via our website.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom was born in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia and raised in Los Angeles. She has published five novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the twentieth century. She has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the US Artists’ Foundation. Her first novel, Three Apples Fell From Heaven, was a New York Times Notable Book and Runner-Up for the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction. Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy, won the PEN/USA Award for Fiction. In 2008, Marcom taught in Beirut, Lebanon on a Fulbright Fellowship. Marcom lives in Northern California where she teaches Creative Writing at Mills College. She is also on faculty at Goddard College in the MFA program in Creative Writing. You can follow her Words Collection on Instagram
@michelinemarcom
Rikki Ducornet is the author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry, she has received both a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Award For Fiction. She has received the Bard College Arts and Letters award and, in 2008, an Academy Award in Literature. Her work is widely published abroad. Recent exhibitions of her paintings include the solo show Desirous at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2007, and the group shows: O Reverso Do Olhar in Coimbra, Portugal, 2008, El Umbral Secreto at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago, Chile, 2009, Las Llavas del Deseo, Fundacion Camaleonart, National Library, Costa Rica, 2016, and La Chasse A l’Objet Du Désir, Galerie Espace, Quebec, 2014. She has illustrated books by Jorge Luis Borges, Robert Coover, Forrest Gander, Kate Bernheimer, Joanna Howard and Anne Waldman among others. Her collected papers including prints and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. Her art work is in the permanent collections of the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago Chile, The McMaster University Museum, Ontario, Canada, and The Biblioteque Nationale, Paris.
The Brick House is an illuminated book about a house where people go to dream. It is a book driven not by character, but instead formed around place and through specific dreams. In the book, the dreams contend with themes of love and loneliness and environmental degradation and sex and beauty and loss, but in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for. Marcom's desire to illuminate the book came in part because of her appreciation of William Blake’s work, and was also inspired by a love of Armenian illuminated manuscripts. She commissioned writer and artist, Fowzia Karimi, to do ten original black and white drawings for the book.