“In my night I idolize the secret meaning of the world.” Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life (Água Viva), 1973

On Thursday, November 5th at 7pm, Callie’s celebrates the book launches of Yanara Friedland’s Thanatographies and Erin Honeycutt’s Night School. The evening features readings by Friedland, Honeycutt, and Haytham el-Wardany, followed by a conversation.

The three authors share an interest in nocturnal imagination and will come together to explore what happens at the edges of waking language. The evening considers literature as a form of afterlife: a space where sleep, listening, and writing become ways of staying in relation to what and who has been lost.

Yanara Friedland developed Thanatographies (Fiction 2 Collective, 2026) while in residency at Callie’s in 2024. The book is a meditation on disappearance and states of wakefulness, in which hidden life remembers and speaks. The book moves through dream, memory, and historical fragments to trace the porous line between the living and the dead.

Erin Honeycutt’s Night School (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2026) extends this inquiry through the materiality of the book and ekphrasis, a literary technique that uses words to describe a work of art. In Night School, Honeycutt asks what kinds of knowledge and presence language can hold once its ordinary, daylight functions fall away.

Haytham el-Wardany, who has also been in residence at Callie’s, treats sleep and listening as active political states. In his The Book of Sleep (transl Robin Moger, Seagull Books, 2020) and his recent text Labour of Listening, he probes sleep as a way of stepping away from our reified bodies and the demands of productivity, into the realm of the departed, which includes other sleepers and the dead.

About the Authors

Yanara Friedland is a writer, translator, and educator born in Berlin. She is the author of Uncountry: A Mythology, Groundswell, and Thanatographies. She teaches creative writing and literature at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies.

Erin Honeycutt is a writer and bookmaker based in Berlin where they run CUTT PRESS, a publishing project with a focus on the materiality of writing and an ongoing dialogue with its tools. They are the author of Dear Enheduanna and Night School as well as various zines and novelettes.

Haytham el-Wardany is a writer and translator who lives and works in Berlin. His recent publications include Jackals and The Missing Letters, The Book of Sleep, and How to Disappear.