KGB Bar

The Open City June reading features a reading to celebrate the publication of our new anthology FLIGHT PATTERNS: A Century of Stories about Flying, edited by Dorothy Spears.

Readers:

Thomas Beller is the author of three books, Seduction Theory, The Sleep-Over Artist, and How To Be a Man, (all from W.W. Norton) and editor of three anthologies. He is a co-founder and editor of Open City Magazine and Books, and creator of the website Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is the author of the recent memoir When Skateboards Will Be Free.

Dorothy Spears is an arts journalist living in New York City.

FLIGHT PATTERNS (Paperback Original, Open City Books, July 2009)
Over the last century, air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficient‹and often irritating means for distributing masses of people to the far reaches of the globe. During its hundred-year history, air travel has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and utterly dire. Flight Patterns traces this trajectory, beginning with the writings of Orville Wright, Charles A. Lindbergh, Beryl Markham, and Amelia Earhart. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry¹s heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of Roald Dahl and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter. More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Alice Munro, Tobias Wolff, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex and etiquette for cramped seating to accounts of racial profiling post­9/11.

This beautiful selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers and a gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writings exude the primal fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the world‹and one¹s own life‹from a great distance. Flight Patterns renders airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.