The University of Arizona Press
When: Saturday, September 9, 2023
Time: 12 p.m., CDT
Where: Printer’s Row, Harrison Street and State Street, Chicago, IL
Juan Martinez, author of Extended Stay, will give tips in the “Horror and Thriller Writing” panel at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago. He will be in conversation with authors Daniel Kraus, Cynthia Pelayo, and Jeremy T. Wilson. The Printers Row Lit Fest, the largest free outdoor literary showcase in the Midwest, is a community-based celebration for book lovers presented by the not-for-profit Near South Planning Board. More than 100,000 visitors are expected over the two-day festival, which will feature carefully selected offerings from over 100 booksellers; everything from the tattered to the rare to newly published works.
All events are free – tickets are not required. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
About Extended Stay:
Haunting and visceral, Extended Stay uses the language of body horror and the gothic to comment on the complicated relationship between the Latinx undocumented experience and capitalism, the erasure of those living and working on the margins, the heavy toll exacted by memory, and the queasy permeability of boundaries that separate the waking world from the world of dreams.
After his parents are killed in a horrific roadside execution, Alvaro flees his home in Colombia and finds work as a line cook at the seedy hotel. Together with his sister, Carmen, he begins to make a new life in the desert, earning a promotion to management along with an irresistible offer to stay at the hotel rent-free. But as beloved photographs go missing, cockroaches seep from the walls, and grotesque strangers wander the corridors, the promise of the Alicia decays into nightmare. Alvaro discovers that the hotel is a small appendage of an enormous creature that feeds on guests and their secrets, one that will eventually bring him face-to-face with the memories he most wants to outrun. Alvaro, Carmen, and their friends decide to cooperate with the creature rather than fight it. But in their efforts to appease it, do they sacrifice too much of themselves?