Free and open to the public; no RSVP necessary.

Join Studio-X NYC to celebrate the release of Man-Made Lands, a collection of seven stories and five real architectural and landscape proposals for cities around the world, and the installation of a new series, entitled "There's No One There," by Joe Alterio.

If young architects are pitching a proposal for a floating public pool in the East River on Kickstarter, how might the influence of prose fiction change? If each year the Museum of Modern Art commissions architects to develop fictional solutions to real problems like climate change and foreclosure, can we look also to novelists also to read about how we’ll live next?

A shift occurred, without us noticing it. Man-Made Lands is a map of marbled boundaries: between cities and nature; between the infinity of the digital and the analog of every day life; between the past and our present, our present and many possible futures; between fictions we envision and the facts that we construct to transform lives. New conditions take Ninth Letter’s mission of collaboration between literary artists and designers beyond the boundaries of the magazine toward new and unexpected alliances.

To mark the release of Man-Made Lands and Ninth Letter's Spring/Summer 2012 issue, and celebrate the opening of "There's No One There," Studio-X NYC will host an evening of drinks, easter eggs, and talk on Wednesday, May 23, at 7pm. Contributors Seth Fried, author of story collection The Great Frustration; architect Dong- Ping Wong of Family; designer Archie Lee Coates from Office of PlayLab; and illustrator Joe Alterio join guest editor Scott Geiger in a conversation.