Kelly Link, Shelley Jackson, and Samantha Hunt stand in front of one of the paintings at PPOW Gallery's Julie Heffernan exhibition as Lucy Corin (inset right, with Christine Schutt) reads from "Mice," one of the stories in the latest issue of Tin House, a collection built around the theme of "fantastic women." As fans mingled around the gallery after the readings—Link, Jackson, and Hunt also have stories in the issue—co-editor Rob Spillman explained how the issue came about, beginning with his admiration for Link, whose work he describes as "so outside the bounds of MFA fiction." Once he and Rick Moody got to talking about other women who were "pushing the envelope" in the short story format by merging the fantastic and the literary, they realized there were enough writers to support an entire issue of the magazine, and here we are. (For his part, Moody contributed an essay about workshopping with Angela Carter in his college years.)

NYU's Cantor Film Center and the Asian/Pacific/American Institute recently hosted a panel discussion on representations of Asians in pulp fiction and film noir, with Daily Telegraph film critic (and NYU professor) Sukhdev Sandhu (right) asking questions of mystery authors Henry Chang and Qiu Xiaolong about the different ways genre fiction has represented Asians throughout the last century. INSET: Anne Landsman chats with a fan after reading the first chapter of her new novel, The Rowing Lesson, at the National Arts Club's PAGE series, where she shared the lectern with Gabriel Brownstein and David Silverman. Landsman will also be taking part in the Sunday Salon at the Williamsburg bar Stain and the Paragraph reading series.