ZYZZYVA Movie Night with Ingrid Rojas Contreras: Strangers on a Train

Co-presented by Zyzzyva Magazine and Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival

This year’s Litquake festival will take place October 8th-24th! For more information about Litquake’s festival and year-round programs, visit litquake.org.

The series wherein famous authors choose a film that intersects with their artistic obsessions.

Nationally bestselling author T Kira Madden introduces Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic noir, Strangers on a Train. In this galloping thriller, two strangers who meet on a train float the idea that they might “exchange murders,” each killing the person the other wants dead. The only problem is that only one of them agrees. This cult favorite is shot in silky black and white and develops in the most quiet and sinister of ways.

Likewise, in T Kira Madden’s novel, Whidbey, a woman traveling on a ferry to the sparsely populated Puget Sound island shares with a stranger that as a child she was sexually abused by a pedophile who is being released. The stranger on the ferry offers with chilling calm to kill him. Kirkus called this novel “as unrelenting as it is probing and compassionate…searingly original.”

Doors open at 5:30 p.m.
Show starts promptly at 6:00 pm.
Q&A with the author follows the movie.
Book signing and a chance to shop T Kira Madden’s recommended reading list (courtesy of Dog Eared Books) will be available both before and after the show.

Zyzzyva Movie Night was created and is produced by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

T Kira Māhealani Madden is a queer, diasporic Kanaka ‘Ōiwi (Native Hawaiian) nationally bestselling author of the novel Whidbey, out now with Mariner. Madden’s memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award. 

Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir The Man Who Could Move Clouds was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It won a California Book Award. Her debut novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was a National Bestseller, and a recipient of a California Book Award. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Believer, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.