K-Ming Chang w/ Carribean Fragoza, "Needlemouth"

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Families pass down stories the way they pass down illnesses - unevenly, without explanation, and usually to the person least equipped to carry them. Chang writes that inheritance as something closer to body horror than to memoir: grandmothers who will not stay dead, daughters who grow teeth where teeth should not be, Taiwanese myth bleeding into American suburbia. She is one of the genuinely strange voices in American fiction right now and she is still young enough that the room will be small. Fragoza across from her is the reason to prioritise this one over the rest of the week: she writes South El Monte with the same willingness to let the uncanny in, and the two of them put Taiwanese-American and Chicana literature in the same conversation, which almost never happens on a stage in this city. Free, Thursday at seven, back room at Skylight, forty folding chairs. If you have ever felt that your family's stories were slightly haunted and that nobody else would believe you, this is the room.