Siel Ju

Category: Fiction

  • Cake Time on the East Coast (and one reading in LA!)

    Cake Time on the East Coast (and one reading in LA!)

    The West Coast tour happened in April, but the East Coast mini Cake Time tour is still coming up!

    But first, I have one reading in Los Angels before flying east. I’ll be one of the guest readers at Lauren Eggert-Crowe’s Bitches of the Drought Chapbook Release Party. It’s free, it’ll be fun, and all sales of chapbooks will go to support progressive causes:

    Bitches of the Drought Chapbook Release Party
    Monday, June 5, 2017, 8 pm
    Stories Books and Cafe, 1716 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles

    Then I’ll be in Brooklyn, New York — where I’ll get to read with fellow Red Hen Press authors Ellen Meeropol and Amy Hassinger:

    An Evening with Red Hen Press
    (Facebook event page)
    Thu, June 8, 2017, 7:30 pm
    Greenlight Bookstore, 686 Fulton St., Brooklyn

    Then I’ll be visiting Philadelphia for the first time, to read with poet Celeste Gainey:

    Siel Ju reads with Celeste Gainey
    (There will be cake!)
    Sunday, June 11, 2017, 2 pm
    Big Blue Marble Bookstore, 551 Carpenter Ln, Philadelphia

    I’d love to see you there!

    I’ll also be in Toronto mid-June visiting my writer friend Marilyn Duarte and doing tourist things and am planning a small meetup and reading. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll send an invite —

  • Cake Time receives a Kirkus starred review

    Cake Time receives a Kirkus starred review

    Cake Time by Siel JuIt’s almost Cake Time — and my forthcoming novel-in-stories received a Kirkus starred review!

    “A promising start for a brave and unapologetically bold new writer,” ends the review. You can read the rest at Kirkus.

    Early copies of Cake Time will be available at AWP in Washington DC in February — and I’ll be going on a west coast book tour around the book launch on April 6, followed by an east coast book tour in June. The itinerary is still being worked out, but some readings are already listed on my events page, with more to be added soon. Hope to see you your town!

    Preorder now: Barnes & Noble | Target | IndieBound | Skylight

  • Vaseline: My new text-collage collaboration for 7×7 LA

    Vaseline: My new text-collage collaboration for 7×7 LA

    https://www.facebook.com/7x7la/videos/341502596181606/

    Up on lit zine 7×7 LA now is “Vaseline,” an experimental text-collage story I co-created with Kevin Sampsell.

    The piece is about shady sleep studies and sinister experiments and sexy dreams. It was created following 7×7 LA’s surrealism-inspired artistic constraints: Kevin and I went back and forth seven times, reacting to each other’s works by responding within 24 hours with a new text or collage, each created within a few hours.

    I’m so excited and honored to have been able to collaborate with Kevin Sampsell, a writer I admire. Read my Five Firsts interview with Kevin, and my review of his novel, This Is Between Us.

    Hope you enjoy “Vaseline“!

  • A Story in an anthology — Nothing to Declare

    Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence.What is a flash sequence? Imagine a series of flash fiction pieces that connect and build on each other — though really, you could also imagine a string of prose poems too, or a sequence of tiny creative non fiction pieces, or a regular short story broken up into little sections —

    Whatever your definition, I recommend that you pick up a new anthology — Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence. New from White Pine Press, this handsome anthology imagines and reimagines tiny prose pieces and their connections and disjunctions.

    Plus — one of my pieces is in the anthology! The story, “The Locust of Desire,” was originally published in ZYZZYVA.

    And don’t miss all the other wonderful work. There are too many great pieces to mention them all, but here are lines from a few to whet your appetite:

    >> Nin Andrews: “As if snow were falling inside each one of us, and no one would make it stop.”

    >> Jim Ruland: “We’re going to need Cuban cigars and Italian espresso. Definitely champagne. Possibly lube.”

    >> Jenn Koiter: “There was always a good Ken and a bad Ken. Always a bad Ken. The bad Ken is necessary.”

    >> Bob Thurber: “She had a wide mouth overcrowded with perfectly straight teeth and a tongue like an angry snake.”

    Thank you to Robert Alexander, Eric Braun, and Debra Marquart, editors of the anthology.

    Pick up Nothing to Declare at Perseus — and come to our flash sequence panel at AWP! More about that soon —

  • My novel-in-stories Cake Time to be published by Red Hen Press

    redhenpressI’m excited and honored to announce my novel-in-stories Cake Time won the Red Hen Fiction Manuscript Award!

    The book will come out in spring 2017 if all goes according to plan.

    Thank you to everyone who read, critiqued, and listened to the stories in this work the last few years — including Peter Steinberg, Edan Lepucki, Paul Mandelbaum, Chris Corning, Travis Koplow, Tanya Knox, Shilpa Argawal, Katherine Motoike, and Carolyn Peters for your valuable feedback and Lauren Eggert-Crowe, David Rocklin, and Zoë Ruiz for giving me opportunities to share pieces of Cake Time at readings.

    I’m so grateful to have you all in my life! Looking forward to working with everyone at Red Hen Press! And thank you in advance to the future readers who will pick up Cake Time —

  • 2 flash fiction pieces in The Los Angeles Review

    Los Angeles Review Fall 2015

    The Los Angeles Review‘s brand new fall 2015 issue is now out — and contains within its pages two of my flash fiction pieces! Here’s an excerpt from the first, “The Panel”:

    We, the six closest friends of the couple, were called on to serve on the panel. Our task was to determine who was in the right, the wife or the husband. To aid us in our decision we received a twenty-minute recording of an argument between the two, which we listened to carefully three times over the four-hour deliberation period.

    Read the rest of that — plus another piece called “Social Psychology” — by picking up a copy of The Los Angeles Review, Volume 18.

    The issue also contains a short piece called “Delorean” by Bryan Hurt, one of my favorite writers and a friend from grad school. Also, don’t miss Ryan Habermeyer’s “A Cosmonaut’s Guide to Microgravitic Reproduction” — which combines space travel and sex and loneliness and madness.

    Lastly: Come hear me read “The Panel” and more at The Los Angeles Review’s reading! That’ll happen Thursday, November 12, 7 pm at Flintridge Bookstore & Coffeehouse, 1010 Foothill Blvd, La Canada Flintridge, Calif. You’ll also get to hear The Los Angeles Review’s own fiction editor, Sean Bernard, and contributor Anna K. Scotti.