Literary Fiction Book Launch: Grand Tour by Aatif Rashid

Aatif Rashid debuts his new novel at Village Well.

Join us for the launch of Aatif Rashid’s new novel Grand Tour!

Aatif will conduct a reading and Q&A and discuss the inspiration behind this probing work.

About the author:

Aatif Rashid is the author of the novels Portrait of Sebastian Khan (2019) and Grand Tour (forthcoming 2026). His short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Metaphorosis, Arcturus, Barrelhouse, Triangle House Review, X-R-A-Y, Maudlin House, The Ex-Puritan, Pithead Chapel, and The Adroit Journal, as well as the anthologies New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (2021), Made in L.A. Volume 4 (2022), and Narrating Pakistan: An Anthology of Contemporary Creative Writing (2023). He’s also published nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Alta and he wrote regularly for The Kenyon Review blog from 2018 to 2021. He teaches creative writing classes through the UCLA Extension Writers program.

About the book:

“In the summer of 2012, when I was twenty-three, I bought the cheapest one-way ticket to continental Europe that I could find.”

From Aatif Rashid, author of Foreword Indies Winner Portrait of Sebastian Khan, comes a new novel about youth set in the now-nostalgic world of European backpacker hostels. Art history student Amir Rahim, unhappy with his life and uncertain about his future, decides to spend two months traveling Europe. What follows is an odyssey of pleasure seeking and self-discovery, with Amir drifting from city to city, staying at youth hostels and cheap hotels, going to museums and cafes, drinking at bars, hooking up with strangers, and meeting others as lost as he is. Ultimately, as he struggles with his own sense of purpose and what he feels is the profound ugliness of the modern world, Amir finds himself asking the age-old burning question: how does one live a meaningful life?

L.A. Book Launch: Wolf Cut by Anna Journey

Featuring Anna Journey, David St. John, and Allison Benis White

Wolf Cut gathers nearly twenty years of work by Anna Journey. From her early work’s baroque lyricism tinged with the southern gothic to her capacious later poems’ signature meditative charisma, Journey reminds us that mystery and imagination are the luminous thresholds through which our reckonings must pass.

Journey will be joined by authors David St. John and Allison Benis White in The Wanda Coleman Theater followed by a book signing and a reception in the Poets’ Garden with tacos and drinks!

Doors Open: 5:30 PM I Readings: 6:00 PM I Reception: 7:30 PM

About the authors

Anna Journey is the author of the poetry collections Wolf Cut: New & Selected Poems, The Judas Ear, The Atheist Wore Goat Silk, and Vulgar Remedies, all from Louisiana State University Press, and If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which was selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series and published by the University of Georgia Press. She’s also published the essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin, with Counterpoint Press. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She’s an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California.

Allison Benis White is the author of five collections of poetry, including A Magnificent Loneliness, winner of the LA Times Book Prize, Please Bury Me in This, winner of the Rilke Prize, and Small Porcelain Head, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize, and named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award and the California Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Pushcart Prize XLI & XLVII: Best of the Small Presses, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and Poets & Writers magazine. She is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

David St. John is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Face: A Novella in Verse, Prism, and Study for the World’s Body: New and Selected Poems, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the co-editor of American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry. He edited The Selected Levis and The Darkening Trapeze: Last Poems by Larry Levis. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.

About Beyond Baroque

Beyond Baroque is one of the United States’ leading independent Literary | Arts Centers and public spaces dedicated to expanding the public’s knowledge of poetry, literature and art through cultural events and community interaction. Founded in 1968 as an experimental literary magazine, Beyond Baroque is based out of the original City Hall building in Venice, California. The Center offers a diverse variety of literary and arts programming including readings and workshops. The building also houses a bookstore with a large collection of new poetry books for sale.

Tickets will be available at the Beyond Baroque bookstore on the day of the event, but we recommend registering in advance through Eventbrite. Masks are encouraged while inside our center. Please arrive early.

Event attendees are expected to behave in a respectful and considerate manner while in our space. Beyond Baroque reserves the right to remove individuals from our events, virtual or otherwise, if they are not respecting the space, staff, fellow attendees, or performers.

Take Fountain: A Night of Non-Fiction Readings presented by LARB

Join the Los Angeles Review of Books at the historic PRS Library for a night of readings as a part of the YesterdayLA series!

Take Fountain: A Night of Non-Fiction Readings in the PRS Library!

Part of PRS’s YesterdayLA 2026, our monthlong celebration of our beloved city’s rich and diverse past.

LARB presents a night of readings that celebrate the hidden gems and oddities that make L.A. endlessly fascinating. Much like the writing it produces, L.A. is a city unlike any other—its peculiar geography, its infamous highways, the shared and fragmented realities sprawl begets.

Here, throngs of eastbound traffic spill into vast mountainous expanses; going westward, thick smog disappears into misty ocean vapor. This is a city that bears witness to the glamorous and the mundane, and which sits atop a fault line. How strange, how remarkable!

The evening will have readings of non-fiction works from L.A. writers Nikki Darling, Jordan Guevara, Molly Lambert, Tejal Rao, Greg Ruben, and Oliver Wang.

Tickets: $15 (in person only event)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.