Literal Interpretations

Writers Matthew Salesses and Kristen Arnett will read from their works Saturday night.

Perhaps, like the Marines, you’ve been looking for a few good men.

Well, I can tell you where you can find at least one.

Mathew Salesses, author of The Hundred-Year Flood, will read from his works Saturday at 7 p.m. at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center as part of the Functionally Literate reading series. The free, quarterly, Burrow Press events pair visiting literary figures with local writers. In this case, the local talent is Kristen Arnett, a fiction and essay writer and editor of specs, a Rollins College journal of arts and culture.

Salesses has been involved with The Good Men Project, a social platform founded in 2009 to collect stories about defining moments in men’s lives and encourage a cultural conversation about enlightened manhood.  The Hundred-Year Flood is a dreamlike coming-of-age tale that follows the story of Tee, a transplanted  Korean-American who is struggling to elude both rising waters and the ghosts of his past. Salesses’ other books include Different Racisms (essays) and I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying (a novel).

Arnett has held fellowships at Kenyon Review, Tin House, and Lambda Literary Foundation. She was awarded Ninth Letter's 2015 Literary Award in Fiction and was named an honorable mention for Glimmer Train's Short Story Award for New Writers. Her work has either appeared or is upcoming in Normal School, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Ninth Letter, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently finishing up her first short fiction collection.

Orlando-based Burrow Press publishes contemporary literature by new and established authors and champions Florida’s literary community. Go to functionallyliterate.org for details.