Arts and Humanities

Updated: Tonight's reading at 21C has been canceled due to Hurricane Sandy-related flight cancelations. Sarabande Books is working on rescheduling the event for 2013.

Justin Torres' surprising and haunting debut novel "We the Animals" introduces us to three near-feral brothers and their young parents, a white mother and Puerto Rican father from Brooklyn who marry when the mother is only 14 and pregnant with the oldest boy. They move to a small town in upstate New York, where they are outsiders even among the other poor families, and struggle against the limitations of their poverty, lack of education and youth.

“They’re these city kids, this mixed-race couple, in this tiny little town,” says Torres. “There aren’t many supporting characters in this book. There are the boys, and there’s Ma and Paps, and it’s very essential in that way. I wanted it to be, to emphasize the claustrophobia of the family, how much they rely on each other and how much they can’t escape each other.”

(Read an excerpt of "We the Animals.")

Excerpt from Justin Torres' new novel, We the Animals.

"Never-Never Time"

We all three sat at the kitchen table in our raincoats, and Joel smashed tomatoes with a small rubber mallet. We had seen it on TV: a man with an untamed mustache and a mallet slaughtering vegetables, and people in clear plastic ponchos soaking up the mess, having the time of their lives. We aimed to smile like that. We felt the pop and smack of tomato guts exploding; the guts dripped down the walls and landed on our cheeks and foreheads and congealed in our hair. When we ran out of to­matoes, we went into the bathroom and pulled out tubes of our mother’s lotions from under the sink. We took off our raincoats and positioned ourselves so that when the mallet slammed down and forced out the white cream, it would get everywhere, the creases of our shut-tight eyes and the folds of our ears.

This week on our new audio diary series, "The Big Break," Actors Theatre apprentice Samantha Beach pulls a shift in the literary department and sees herself in the incoming ten-minute play scripts. Louisville Ballet trainee Claire Horrocks takes us inside the dancer's lounge, while Kentucky Opera studio artist Brad Raymond balances family time with the rigors of the stage. 

Learn more about our audio diarists, who report in every Thursday about life in Louisville's professional arts companies.

With the country closing in on Election Day, Louisville Repertory Company opens Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet’s presidential election-year farce “November” this week.  

“November” opens Friday and runs through Nov. 2  in the Kentucky Center’s MeX Theatre.