Pam Houston is the prize-winning author of "Cowboys Are My Weakness" and "Contents May Have Shifted," among other books. She is professor of English at the University of California–Davis and lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. "How do we become who we are in the…
Gregory Renz draws on his years of experience as a firefighter to bring a hardscrabble authenticity to his novel. He packs the tale with plenty of action and a lot of heart. His firefighting sequences are detailed and thrilling, placing readers right in front of the flames. His prose is clean and, at times, poetic...—Kirkus…
In Irish Celtic lore, “thin places” are those locales where the veil between this world and the otherworld is porous, where there is mystery in the landscape. The earth takes on the hue of the sacred among peoples whose connection to place has remained unbroken through the ages. What happens, then, when a Celtic view…
Author talk and book signing with Jaquira Díaz, author of "Ordinary Girls: A Memoir." “There is more life packed on each page of Ordinary Girls than some lives hold in a lifetime.” —Julia Alvarez, author of "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" and "In the Time of the Butterflies" In this searing memoir, Jaquira…
Hear from and meet John Galligan, author of the thriller set in Wisconsin — "Bad Axe County" —a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2019! Dennis Lehane meets Megan Miranda in this tense, atmospheric thriller about the first female sheriff in rural Bad Axe County, Wisconsin, as she searches for a missing girl, battles local…
Ed Garvey (1940–2017) was one of the most influential and colorful progressive politicians in Wisconsin’s history. Growing up in what was a conservative rural town, he got his first taste of liberal activism at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, became the first executive director of the National Football League Players’ Union, led two…
A live Zoom event: John Galligan, author of “Dead Man Dancing” — the much-anticipated sequel to his gritty, brash and totally gripping thriller “Bad Axe County” — chats with mystery writer James DeVita (author of “A Winsome Murder.”) For more information, click here.
James Bohnen will lead our virtual book club discussion of "Summer", the final book in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet. In the autumn of 2015, Smith embarked on a perilous adventure. She was determined to write a quartet of books, one a year, based on the seasons. Here was the catch: These novels would incorporate what…
A racehorse, a dog, a raven and two ducks walk into a park in Paris. This sounds like the set-up for a bad joke but it is actually the list of characters in the most delightful book of 2020. Jane Smiley's novel teaches the healing power of friendship (cross-species or otherwise), the importance of observation…
For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain," he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the…