Mike Amnasan's novel I Can't Distinguish Opposites(1988, Black Star Series), and its unpublished sequel, Joe Liar,were two of the most important works to come out of San Francisco's "New Narrative" school of the 1980s, arriving like a pair of thunderclaps across a livid purple sky of politics, sex, genre-bending, labor writing, memoir, and deconstruction. Amnasan is the author as well of a full-length play, Revery,and the editor of the controversial literary/sociological journal Ottotole(1985-1989). This year he won the Sheet Metal Workers Local 104 College Scholarship Award to study literature at San Francisco State University. Born in Pasco (Washington), he will be reading tonight from a memoir-in-progress, Beyond the Safety of Dreams.

September 10, 1999