Category Archives: Michael Thomas

January 28, 2013: What a Great Night!

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The sleet deterred neither our artists nor our big, warm FPP audience!  We had a fabulous time listening to work by Stacey D’Erasmo, Monica Ong, and Michael Thomas, and to DJ Lady DM‘s groovy opening and closing sets.

Stacey D’Erasmo‘s forthcoming novel tells the comically bittersweet story of a singer trying to make a comeback years after her youthful success.  The excerpt D’Erasmo read led us into fascinating first person plural territory, as the main character recalls the making of her second album, a spectacular failure: seven musicians and producers hole up in a chateau and become a “we,” bonding over drugs and isolation and the mating calls of deer in the woods around them. But the artistic transcendence they feel never manifests in the music.  Monica Ong combined projected images and poems to stunning effect.  Her first image was a childhood photograph of her mother gathered with her mother and six siblings.  The accompanying poem revealed that her mother was one of the three “boys,” dressed and staged so that the family would not lose face from a surfeit of girls.  Her next images and poems brought us into human physiology, giving voice to the silent mechanisms of the body– to the body’s frightening failures and the way we fail our bodies through cultural mores and silence.  She closed with a moving poem written for the FPP reading in response to the Sandy Hook shootings.  Michael Thomas read an electrifying essay from his forthcoming collection.  He recounts a roadtrip he took with his brother who was recently arrested and floundering; as he departs, he fears the trip is ill-advised, that two black men on the highway at night are an easy target for police, and that his unrestrained, undiscriminating brother might threaten Thomas’s hard-won equilibrium and the privacy of mind he fiercely protects.  The essay was a challenge to the comfort and validity of the “we.”  Thank you to our readers for a compelling array of work and for their responses to the FPP theme.  Special thanks, again, to DJ Lady DM who closed out the night with more great music (that very nearly got us dancing– okay, maybe we danced a little)!

The FPP Interview: Michael Thomas

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FPP asked acclaimed novelist Michael Thomas about the risk of memoir, who is mad about his forthcoming book, and what urgent advice he’s given young writers.

Photo by Angel Franco.

Please tell us about your forthcoming memoir The Broken King. It’s a 6-part memoir about Thomas men. Each section contains a central event, commentary, and meditation.

Are their risks in telling these stories?  Yes: you could hurt those you love, or, simply, tell the stories poorly and injure your readers.

How would you describe the memoir-writing experience? Awful. It nearly ruined me.

To read more of this interview, go here.

Man Gone Down is Michael Thomas’s “luminous debut novel”

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‘I know things aren’t going well,’’ begins the narrator of Michael Thomas’s debut novel, bracing himself for a downward journey. Broke and bile-infused, Harvard-educated, now jobless and down on his luck in New York, he is estranged from his wife and three children. It is the eve of his 35th birthday, and he has four days to somehow scrape together $12,000 to keep his family afloat.

Read the rest of Lucy Daniel’s review of Michael Thomas’s first book, Man Gone Down, here.

 

Announcing the Lineup for Our January 28th Reading!

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The next event in the First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series will be January 28th at Shrine.  Note that while we usually start at 7pm, we will begin at 6:45pm on the 28th since we have a special guest, international DJ Lady DM.   Lady DM will spin for 30 minutes, followed by readings by novelists Stacey D’Erasmo and Michael Thomas, and a performance by poet and multi-media artist Monica Ong.  Lady DM will close out the evening with another half hour set.  We’re excited to host such an artistically rich group!

With roots stemming from the legendary musical island of Jamaica in the Caribbean, Mackenzie Largie a.k.a. Lady DM describes herself as a ‘musical expat’, an apt description for her take on crossing genres of dance-able music. Lady DM’s story begins in 1995, in NYC as a host on FIT’s radio station, by day; and avid regular at parties like Theo Parrish’s SugarBabies by night. Two years later, she begins her ascent of the city’s DJ circuit proper, a regular at venues like the Limelight, Orchard Bar, and The Cooler.  While based in Europe from 99’-10’, Lady DM regularly hosted radio shows in Zurich, and Berlin, while jetting around entertaining crowds at legendary parties like Amsterdam’s Mazzo Club, Zurich’s Lethargy festival, Milan’s Cox 18, Munich’s Muffathalle, and Berlin’s WMF. http://djladydm.tumblr.com/

Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, and The Sky Below, and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in July. She is a former Stegner Fellow and the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim  Fellowship in Fiction. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Review , Bookforum, The New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. Her fourth novel, Wonderland, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in spring 2014. http://www.staceyderasmo.com/

The work of artist-poet Monica Ong investigates cultural silences in the context of public health. The silence of the daughter, the fear of losing face, and untranslated trauma, are aspects of the medical-emotional landscape that her work evokes. Monica completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research has included fellowships at the Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University, and the Writing the Medical Experience Workshop at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a Kundiman poetry fellow.  Her experimental image-poems have been published in the Lantern Review, The New Sound: A Journal of  Interdisciplinary Art & Literature, Drunken Boat, Tidal Basin Review, and will be featured in the forthcoming issue of the Glassworks Magazine. She was recently nominated by Tidal Basin Review for the 2012 Pushcart Poetry Prize.  Her narrative installations have been featured in exhibitions at the AC Institute in NYC, WomanMade Gallery of Chicago, and the Parachute Factory of New Haven, where she curated the exhibition Critical Condition, which collects medical narratives from diverse cultural communities. http://monicaong.com/

Michael Thomas is the author of Man Gone Down (Grove/Atlantic, 2007), a novel that follows a 35-year-old African-American man, broke and estranged from his white wife and three children, who has four days to keep his family afloat and reclaim his stake in the American Dream. The book was selected as one of the The New York Times Book Review’s top five novels of the year, as well as a New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book. In June 2009, Thomas was awarded the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—his novel was selected from 145 books nominated by libraries around the globe, of which four were from the US. In 2013, Thomas will publish a memoir, The Broken King, about four generations of men in his family. http://www.blueflowerarts.com/michael-thomas

Venue:  Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 6:45pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/