AIRPLANE READING Anthology launch at Octavia Books

Octavia Books will host the launch of the AIRPLANE READING anthology at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, September 7, at their storefront (513 Octavia).

Co-editor Mark Yakich will be on hand to celebrate with writers Anne Gisleson, Anya Groner, Thomas Beller, Sarah Allison, and Pia Z. Ehrhardt, who will read from, discuss, and sign the anthology.

Harriet Baskas, travel writer for USA Today and author of Stuck at the Airport, found the collection to be “a marvelous story round-up exploring and explaining what air travel does to us–and makes us do.”

The book, co-edited by Yakich and Christopher Shaberg, is a storytelling collection that animates, reflects on, and rejuvenates the experience of flight. Most of the anthology’s pieces originally appeared on the duo’s site AirplaneReading.org.

Christopher Schaberg (Editor) worked as a “cross-utilized agent” for United Airlines at the Bozeman, Montana airport, between 2001 and 2003. He is now a cultural critic and associate professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of The Textual Life of Airports (Bloomsbury, 2013), _Deconstructing Brad Pitt (Bloomsbury, 2014), and The End of Airports (Bloomsbury, 2015).

Mark Yakich (Editor) is an aerophobe, poet, and professor of English at Loyola University New Orleans. Mark is the author of two poetry collections, Unrelated Individuals Forming a Group Waiting to Cross (Penguin, 2004) and The Importance of Peeling Potatoes in Ukraine (Penguin, 2008), and the novel A Meaning for Wife (Ig Publishing, 2011). His most recent book is Poetry: A Survivor’s Guide (Bloomsbury, 2015).