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Virtual Reading: Web Features & “Fruit Rot” chapbook
About the Virtual Event
When: August 15th, 2:00pm (PST)
Where: Zoom /// Cost: Free!
The Conium Review recently re-launched its website. As the world grapples with COVID-19, the Internet’s ability to connect people is more important than ever. Our annual print edition is alive and well, but this virtual space offers a monthly compliment. Most web features post on the 15th of each month, showcasing a single author with a custom-designed, visually striking page for each story. The first two features are Jane Hammons’s “Creature Creator” and Gina Rose’s “Eight Thousand Dollars in 1981.” Yongsoo Park’s “Hausfrau Dad” goes live on August 15th.
Alongside the website’s re-launch, our managing editor also has a new chapbook, Fruit Rot, published by Etchings Press at the University of Indianapolis. Fruit Rot is a contemporary fable that involves magic fruit, comic books, and a few dead bodies along the way. It’s a whimsical and darkly funny read.
This virtual reading celebrates the both new site and our editor’s chapbook. We hope you can join us. Q&A will follow, plus some opportunities to receive free copies of The Conium Review and Fruit Rot.
About the Readers
James R. Gapinski
James R. Gapinski is the author of Fruit Rot (Etchings Press, 2020), Edge of the Known Bus Line (Etchings Press, 2018), and Messiah Tortoise (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2018). His short fiction has appeared in Heavy Feather Review, Hobart, Juked, Monkeybicycle, Paper Darts, and other publications. He teaches for Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA program, and he’s managing editor of The Conium Review.
“Gapinski has a natural ability to unveil the hidden darkness in life’s inescapable choices with gentleness and care . . . ” –Hillary Leftwich, author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock
“Gapinski skillfully illuminates the deep places where pain, fear and injustice live.” –Emily Koon, author of We Are Still Here
““Fruit Rot is a satire that complicates its subject rather than parodies it; a fable that shuns moralistic conclusions; a rumination on the hexed miracle of finally getting what you want.” –Zach Powers, author of First Cosmic Velocity
“Hallucinatory, savage, but ultimately hopeful, Edge of the Known Bus Line is a bloody bible for our times.” –Maryse Meijer, author of Northwood
“James R. Gapinski’s Messiah Tortoise is like a trip to a zoo after a pink cloud of nitrous has settled overhead. You’re elated, you’re having fun, and you’re in tune in a way that surprises you.” –Lindsay Hunter, author of Eat Only When You’re Hungry
“The dark, smart absurdity of James R. Gapinski’s writing jolts and delights in equal measure. Gapinski responds to today’s zigzag world with innovative form and gut-punching pathos.” –Ashley Farmer, author of The Women
Gina Rose
Gina Rose is an African American and Chinese American writer in Oakland, California. She attended Barnard College in New York City where she received the Howard M. Teichmann Writing Prize. Her work has been featured in Rigorous and Penultimate Peanut magazines.
Yongsoo Park
Yongsoo Park is the author of the novels Boy Genius and Las Cucarachas, the memoir Rated R Boy, and the essay collection The Art of Eating Bitter about his losing battle to give his children an analog childhood.
“In Boy Genius, Park has created a unique hero, one who is every bit as memorable as Alexander Portnoy, Augie March or Ignatius Reilly.” –Willard Manus, Lively Arts“
“Park is clever and caustic in depicting America’s treatment of its minority underclass. . .” —Kirkus Reviews
“Park’s affable and low-key style belies not only an incredible courage but weaves a steady-tempoed music that recapitulates a past that I was certain was lost forever. Park’s books are the mirror and lens I have been seeking my whole reading life–and ones I have not yet encountered elsewhere.” –Eugene Lim, author of Dear Cyborgs
“In Las Cucarachas, Park does more than showcase a harsh perspective of life in 1980s New York City. He offers readers an unflinching and unique perspective on the dark side of our contemporary society while retaining a subtle hope for some sort of begrudging multicultural harmony.” –Hirsh Sawhney, The Brooklyn Rail
“Park’s Rated R Boy belongs in the tradition of the classic Korean American writers like Younghill Kang and Richard Kim, who were the literary voices of their generations of immigrants. Like Kang and Kim, Park’s narrative is nostalgic, critical, tragic, and poignant by turns, evoking vital aspects of the Korean American experience not seen in the mainstream of ethnic literature.” –Heinz Insu Fenkl, author of Memories of My Ghost Brother
Fiction editor William VanDenBerg will be 
One of our editors, Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, will be performing at the