This Thursday, March 5th, John Law will read from his new short story collection The Space Between at City Lights Bookstore. From the announcement on the City Lights site:
The Space Between is a collection of three stories inspired by the author’s lifelong obsession with bridges. An avid urban adventurer and bridge historian, the author shares his passion for these engineering marvels while delving into their potential to fuel our dreams, fears, and nightmares. Part dreamscapes, part adventure tales, these narratives take the reader on an exploration of bridges to inspire their contemplation on a structural as well as metaphysical level.
John draws from his personal experience of admiring and ascending bridges in the Bay Area and around the world. He has a perspective that literally few people have on local icons the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. There’s no more fitting place to discuss San Francisco’s icons than City Lights, founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in 1953 and a landmark ever since in SF’s North Beach neighborhood.
Here’s an excerpt from my review of The Space Between which will appear in the April issue of Hi Fructose magazine:
These stories move past the concrete, into the supernatural. Characters drop in and out of dreams, rise above the span and fall below the water line, move between childhood and midlife crisis, and come ultimately in and out of life.
The book is available now from Furnace Press.
John Law is Special Projects Coordinator for Laughing Squid and a guest blogger. He is also a proud accomplice and associate of such noted cabals as Survival Research Labs, Dark Passage, and Cyclecide. And he is a known wrangler of The Dogminican Trinity, a trio of mysterious and ginormous canine heads which often appear in times of benign creative cacophony or unrepentant mischief around the Bay Area.
A true multimedia threat, John co-produced and appears in the film Head Trip a documentary about those same dog heads making the trip from SF to NYC for a Laughing Squid show and in the process fraternizing with every roadside attraction along the way.
Finally, here’s a clip from a talk and slideshow that John gave last December about his personal experiences with bridges in San Francisco and elsewhere.
See Previously: The Space Between, Short Story Fiction About Bridges by John Law
photos by Scott Beale
