Starr Reading Series

November 30 The Universe is Finished! by b Dang
Flask might want to die and Stubb keeps staring at her through the window. Ish is illiterate and Queequeg finds him hitchhiking off the highway. There’s some other people -- they’re tying each other up I think? Hey! We’re all singing songs! Suspended in an alternate universe where Moby-Dick by Herman Melville becomes the basis for a new American religion, The Universe is Finished! charts the emotional landscape of an assortment of people for which the text contains everything they might ever need.

December 1 Make Believers by Salwa Meghjee
Twin A and Twin B are identical. Twin B is depressed. Twin A is not depressed. If they do a twin study, sit back-to-back, delve into the past, reveal secrets, and crack some eggs, maybe they can figure out why.

December 2 Jackie/Jacquie by Lisa Clair
Two women both named Jackie or was it Jacquie (? !) And the center of them the Medias Res is also a planet in outer space, a planet inhabited by the Cecropians of Cecropia, an interstellar race of ass-faced beings !!! GET IT ?!

December 7 The Fifth Plague by Lily Haje
Do you know about the cows? Do you know what’s out there? During the 1970s, thousands of cattle mutilations were reported across the American Southwest. These cases were as gruesome as they were hard to explain. Animals found with missing organs or flayed with surgical precision. No trace of a culprit, no signs of scavengers, no footprints to be found. Is this simply an impossibly improbable coincidence of nature? Too many unexplained details. The work of cultists? the deep state? cryptids? aliens? Too crazy to believe. And yet… How can you live with not knowing?

December 8 The Haunting of ecila: A Clown Show by AliCHE Kabia
ecila inherents a fucking beast of a ghost, who just so happens to be well-versed in Shakespeare's Canon. Within the ridiculous that changes the capacity of sense, and the sense one must make. In the space between dreams, and the hum of a changing channel comes a fabulation of classic proportions. What happens when a shipmmate, tied to Shakespeare’s colonial legacy, is cursed to haunt a people? To travel with them through the crimes they do not speak of? Whose crimes deserve to be recorded, and whose crimes deserve to be remembered?

December 9 I’m a Really Good Swimmer by Mya Ison
I’m a Really Good Swimmer is a two-hander about fracturing of identity and self-destruction. A young, biracial woman finds herself on the brink of drowning in the ocean. As she tries to sift through the disjointed episodes of her life flashing before her eyes, she discovers that all these experiences feature the same face over and over again. She is forced to confront what these faces mean about her own relationship to whiteness only to find that the only way through may be to dive deeper.