Ithaca Irrealist Readings
The Ithaca Irrealist Reading Series at Liquid State Brewing began in May 2025 and has marched on from there. Join all loyal partisans of the IILF for monthly nights of good fiction, good beer, and good company!
20 March 2026, 6PM
Writer from Colombo, Sri Lanka, whose novels The Saint of Bright Doors and Rakesfall have won the Le Guin Prize for Fiction, Nebula, Ignyte, Locus, Crawford, and Otherwise Awards, and been selected as New York Times Notable Books of 2023 and 2024. A 2025-2026 Fellow of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Author of the novel After World—named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, the Los Angeles Times tech, Booklist, and Strange Horizons—and the story collection Portalmania. Published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Granta, and Conjunctions.
The IILF
The Ithaca Irrealist Liberation Front is an underground movement of literary anarchists bound by a manifesto as secret as it is perverse. Its only public (and therefore lowest ranking) member is Will McMahon.
What is irrealism?
It isn’t real, but it can hurt you.
Irrealism describes an artistic position that does not privilege the typical human conception of reality.
Is this series for literary fiction or genre fiction?
“Literary” is an adjective describing a relation to literature—the written word. “Genre” is Old French for “gender” and can, eccentrically, refer to which shelf a book is set down on for sale. We insist that any such inquiries be translated, e.g. “What is the gender of this book?”
Those abusing these words will face the revolutionary justice of the IILF.