Penguin Plays Rough: Your Cities Re-imagined

Overview

Plato imagined Atlantis as a city of concentric rings: of land within water, water within land. Thomas More created a Utopia that occupied strange laws and a crescent island. And when Marco Polo sat with Khublai Khan, the emperor of China, and described his empire to him town by town, Italian author Italo Calvino imagined these towns as Invisible Cities of story and coincidence. Taking its cue more roughly from Calvino's dream cities than his predecessors' yen for a perfect one, Penguin Plays Rough is re-imagining their December evening of contact fiction into Your Cities Re-Imagined.

Each of the evening's authors will be re-working a metropolis in their mind's eye, offering up a new vision of geography. Melbourne Comedy Festival star Luke Ryan will be reshaping his native Perth, Elena Maria Gomez will put Brisbane in its place and Sonja Dechian will say words for Melbourne. Standing in for Sydney will be Annaliese Constable, while Nick Sun will pull London into Aussie orbit. There are still four state capitals left, and space for five extra wildcard readers. You can be content to listen, or bring a page of story, sign up on the night and see what city-making springs from your imagination.

Image by Steve Swayne.