Writers’ Workshop graduate Joseph Cassara will read from his novel, The House of Impossible Beauties. This gritty and gorgeous debut follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and ’90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the documentary Paris Is Burning. “Exceptional . . . The writing is erotically luscious, lyrically intense, forthrightly in your face, and pitch-perfect in the dialog, and the suspense comes from wondering what’s going to happen to these people…” —Library Journal

A former fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cassara currently lives in
Iowa City.