The lit series everyone’s talking about isn’t afraid to make a scene.
Listen to Elizabeth Koch talk about traditional literary readings, and it’s pretty clear that wasn’t the way she and fellow Literary Death Match founder Todd Zuniga were going to draw a crowd. “I hate them—they’re so boring! I hate it when people read too long. It’s narcissistic. We don’t want to listen to your shitty rough draft for forty-five minutes—I don’t care how famous you are.”
Founding and executive editors, respectively, of the literary journal Opium, Koch and Zuniga have lived in San Francisco less than a year, but in that time they’ve already established themselves as fixtures in the literary community. Their calling card? A no-holds-barred reading series, called Literary Death Match, that pits notable writers against one another in a reading competition presided over by a trio of judges. Imagine American Idol meets Paris Review, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect: two rounds of “serious” readings act as elimination heats; in the third, the competition is narrowed to two writers, who compete in a not-necessarily-literature-related challenge (think sack races and long-division problems) to determine the victor.
Zuniga and Koch came up with the death-match concept in New York City in 2005 as a way to distinguish their literary events from others happening nightly. Says Koch, “If everyone is going to compete for the same audience and the same readers, [we thought we’d] bring it into one room and create a kind of community experience.”
The events are anything but boring—July’s instantly infamous SF debut of Death Match took a dramatic turn when, after reader Stephen Elliott of McSweeney’s received a harsh critique from judge Howard Junker of Zyzzyva, he responded by throwing a drink on Junker. Future events promise to be similarly exciting; Litquake’s installment of Death Match will pit Opium’s Daniel Handler against Wesley Stace of Swink, Gary Kamiya of Salon and Evany Thomas of McSweeney’s. They’ll be judged by The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman, the Chronicle’s Oscar Villalon, and Shawn Landry, producer of the SF Improv Festival. “When people go to readings in NYC, they’re only going so they can pitch the editor—or to be near a celebrity writer,” says Zuniga. “Here, people go because they love reading and they love writing—it’s a celebration.” A sentiment any well-read partygoer can get behind. Just remember to hold on to your drink.
Please visit litquake.org for more information.
By Jessica Battilana
