Event: Why Fantasy Matters

Naomi will be taking part in a cool event next week on October 5, 2011 at The Center for Fiction! She will join authors Kelly Link, Felix Gilman and Lev Grossman to talk about fantasy and the importance of imagination. Here are more details:

Why Fantasy Matters

• Wednesday October 5, 2011
• 7:00 pm
• The Center for Fiction
  17 E. 47th Street
  New York City, NY 10017
• FREE / RSPV to http://www.centerforfiction.org/calendar/big-read-why-fantasy-matters or call (212) 755-6710

Acclaimed authors Kelly Link, Felix Gilman, Naomi Novik, and Lev Grossman take a look at why fantasy matters in our lives and imaginations. This panel, moderated by Laura Miller, will dive into the genre and go beyond the subject of elves and wizards. This event is part of The Center for Fiction’s month-long tribute to Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Kelly Link is the author of three collections of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, and Pretty Monsters. Her short stories have won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. She was born in Miami, Florida, and once won a free trip around the world by answering the question “Why do you want to go around the world?” (”Because you can’t go through it.”) Link and her family live in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, run Small Beer Press, and play ping-pong. In 1996 they started the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

Felix Gilman has been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award and the Crawford Award for best new writer, and the Locus Award for best first novel. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Thunderer and Gears of the City. His latest book is The Half-Made World. He lives with his wife in New York City.

Naomi Novik was born in New York in 1973, a first-generation American, and raised on Polish fairy tales, Baba Yaga, and Tolkien. Her first novel, His Majesty’s Dragon, the first volume of the Temeraire series, was published in 2006 and has been translated into 23 languages. She has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel, and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. She is one of the founding board members of the Organization for Transformative Works, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the fair-use rights of fan creators, and is herself a fanfic writer and fan vidder, as well as one of the architects of the open-source Archive Of Our Own. Novik lives in New York City with her husband, Edgar-winning mystery novelist Charles Ardai, their shiny new daughter Evidence, and eight computers. You can find out more at her website.

Lev Grossman is the author of The Magicians and its sequel The Magician King, both New York Times bestsellers. His other novels include the international bestseller Codex. He is the book critic for Time magazine and has written for numerous other publications, including the New York Times, the Believer, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, Salon and Wired. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.

Laura Miller is a senior writer at Salon.com, which she co-founded in 1995. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the Last Word column for two years. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008) and the editor of The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000). She lives in New York.