4 Dangerous & Immigrant Books: A Fundraising Party

Carlos Labbé, author of the excellent novels Navidad & Matanza (available now) and Loquela (forthcoming), sent me this information about a fundraising event he’s putting on this Saturday for Sangría Legibilities, a nonprofit publisher that he helped found. Since Sangría is the sort of press a lot of Three Percent readers are in to, and since everybody loves a party, I thought I’d post all the necessary info here:

4 Dangerous & Immigrant Books: A Fundraising Party
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Y gallery, 319 Grand St, 5th floor, NY 10002
The event is free.

Sangría Legibilities is a non-profit independent imprint that publishes books in translation. In June 2015 we started a crowdfunding campaign to print our first round of novels and short stories by Latin American writers. We are celebrating the end of our campaign with a party and a killer program.

Readings by Claudia Salazar (Peru), Carlos Labbé (Chile), Dinapiera Di Donato (Venezuela), Charly Vasquez (Puerto Rico), and Mónica Ríos (Chile).

Perfomances by Francisca Benítez (Chile), Iván Monalisa Ojeda (Chile), and Claudia Bitrán (Chile-US).

Also, there will be tarot readings! And a DJ! (I really wish I could go.)

And here’s some info about the press:

Sangría Legibilities

The story of Sangria Legibilities begins 7 years ago. In 2008, Chilean writers Carlos Labbé and Mónica Ríos taught literature and scriptwriting, they were proliferate researchers, experienced publishers, and on the road to publishing their first novels. They were hanging out in their kitchen, jobless and dissatisfied with the literary scene in Chile, when they decided to start their own publishing house to give circulation to all those novels that get lost in the history of Chilean literature because rich publishers won’t even look at books without a big fat check between their pages. Having beers with visual artist Joaquín Cociña, Sangría Editora was born.

Labbé and Ríos arrived in the United States in 2010, following a scholarship Ríos earned for a Ph.D. program in Spanish at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, right after publishing her first novel Segundos. That same year, Carlos Labbé was recognized as one of the best young Latin American writers by Granta Magazine, as he had just published his third novel in Spain. In 2013, they moved to New York City, where they became a part of a growing community of Latin American artists. They soon found themselves with a bunch of different and rare novels in their hands. Adding to the independent publishers and translators in the US, where Labbé had already published his novel Navidad & Matanza (Open Letter, 2013), these Chilean authors created a non-profit organization called Sangría Legibilities, convinced that Latin American writers are more than informants or representatives of a minority.

Sangría Legibilities has a similar spirit to its sister imprint in Chile: it functions as a collective—in addition to Ríos and Labbé, Legibilities is composed of feminist intellectual and translator Carolina Alonso Bejarano and comic book artist and designer Peter Quach––and has different collections focused on novels, short stories, and political texts with rare textualities. Sangría aims to show another face of Latin America: Sangría, as we know, is a drink, but is also the word used in Spanish to call the old and senseless therapy of bleeding out illnesses, the inside of an arm, and, yes, indentation.

In September, Sangría Legibilities will release its first books in translation: Chilean Iván Monalisa Ojeda’s short stories, La Misma Nota, Forever, on transvestite Latina sex workers in Manhattan, translated by Professor Marc Brudzinski; The Book of the Letter A, a Bronx santero manifesto by Portorrican writer Ángel Lozada; and They Fired Her Again, a short novel on an the hardships of living in New York City with no papers, by Claudia Hernández, from El Salvador, translated by Aarón Lacayo. Sangría Legibilities launched a crowdfunding campaign to finance the publication of these works, which will close with a party at Y gallery: three hours of intense readings and performances by Latin American writers, artists, and musicians, all in celebration of bringing these Latin American voices to a wider audience.

Go check it out!