The Art of the Short Story: Leslie Kirk Campbell on The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs with Sidik Fofana

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT March 8, 2022

Online via Zoom & at
The Center for Fiction*

The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs (1) - Eliana Cohen-Orth

In-person* tickets include a $10 bookstore voucher, redeemable toward the featured event book on the night of the event. All registrants will receive a link to livestream the event.

Leslie Kirk Campbell is joined by fellow short story author Sidik Fofana (Stories from the Tenants Downstairs), a 2018 Emerging Writer Fellow, for a discussion and reading of her masterful debut collection: The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs. In eight gorgeously crafted stories, Campbell explores the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, the collection of “marvelous, stirring stories” is “both timeless and timely” (Anthony Doerr).

*Proof of vaccination is required to attend this event in person. Mask wearing is also required throughout the building. Accepted vaccination proofs include:

CDC vaccination card
Excelsior pass
a record of vaccination from the healthcare provider who administered your vaccine

If you remain unvaccinated because of a disability or sincerely held religious belief, please contact us at [email protected] for assistance or to request a reasonable accommodation.

In Conversation

Leslie Kirk Campbell

Leslie Kirk Campbell

Leslie Kirk Campbell’s debut short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs (Sarabande Books) won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indian Review, and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is the author of Journey into Motherhood (Riverhead) and has received fellowships at Playa and Ucross. She teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991.

Photo Credit: Thomas Schenkel
Sidik Fofana

Sidik Fofana

Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a high school English teacher in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. He was also named an Emerging Writer Fellow at The Center for Fiction in 2018. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection composed of eight narratives about residents of a fictional building in Harlem, will be published by Scribner in August 2022.

Photo Credit: Roque Nonini

Featured Books

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The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs

By Leslie Kirk Campbell

Published by Sarabande Books

PURCHASE

The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs is about the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, this collection of short stories is a study in compassion and in passion, a must-read for our times.
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Stories from the Tenants Downstairs

By Sidik Fofana

Published by Simon & Schuster

PURCHASE

Set in a Harlem high rise, a stunning debut about a tight-knit cast of characters grappling with their own personal challenges while the forces of gentrification threaten to upend life as they know it.

Like Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place and Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, Sidik Fofana’s electrifying collection of eight interconnected stories showcases the strengths, struggles, and hopes of one residential community in a powerful storytelling experience.

Each short story follows a tenant in the Banneker Homes, a low-income high rise in Harlem where gentrification weighs on everyone’s mind. There is Swan in apartment 6B, whose excitement about his friend’s release from prison jeopardizes the life he’s been trying to lead. Mimi, in apartment 14D, who hustles to raise the child she had with Swan, waitressing at Roscoe’s and doing hair on the side. And Quanneisha B. Miles, a former gymnast with a good education who wishes she could leave Banneker for good, but can’t seem to escape the building’s gravitational pull. We root for these characters and more as they weave in and out of each other’s lives, endeavoring to escape from their pasts and blaze new paths forward for themselves and the people they love.

Stories from the Tenants Downstairs brilliantly captures the joy and pain of the human experience and heralds the arrival of a uniquely talented writer.

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