Elephant Rock Books fiction reading March 11 at 7 pm.

It's been a while since we've had a fiction reading, so we're thrilled to feature two very talented writers on March 11 at 7 pm.

Patricia Ann McNair will read from her award-winning collection The Temple of Air, which was the winner of the Devil’s Kitchen Award and the Chicago Writer’s Assn. Book of the Year.

Jacob Appel will read from his forthcoming novel The Biology of Luck. He's won the Tobias Wolff Award, The Journal Fiction Prize and the Walker Percy Prize.

Further info:

The Temple of Air was recently declared as The Chicago Writers Association’s Book of the Year in Traditional Fiction. It previously won The Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Prose and was a finalist for The Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Fiction. In the manner of Winesburg, Ohio, McNair weaves the tragic, beautiful, secretive, and expectant lives of the townspeople of New Hope together to form a narrative that reveals more than just these characters themselves. The book unveils the story of a place, its inhabitants, and the tragedy and consequence that sometimes comes with simply living, in a way that only truly great fiction can. Find out more about this book at http://patriciaannmcnair.com/ or read the first chapter at http://erpmedia.net/books/TheTempleOfAir.html.

Jacob M. Appel has published short fiction in more than two hundred literary journals. His short story, Shell Game With Organs, won the Boston Review Short Fiction Contest in 1998. Another story, Enoch Arden's One Night Stands, won first prize in the New Millennium Writings competition in 2004. A third story, The Ataturk of the Outer Boroughs, won the William Faulkner-William Wisdom short story competition. Jacob has also won annual contests sponsored by Missouri Review, Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Writers' Voice, the Dana Awards, the Salem Center for Women Writers, and Washington Square. His story about two census takers, Counting, was short listed for the O. Henry Award in 2001. Other stories received "special mention" for the Pushcart Prize in 2006 and 2007.