UPDATE: TONIGHT'S READING WILL NOW BE HELD AS A VIRTUAL EVENT ON INSTAGRAM LIVE
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Join us at our Fox Point store as we welcome authors Andrew Altschul (THE GRINGA, Melville House) and Karan Mahajan (THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS, Viking) to the store! After the reading, Altschul and Mahajan will be in conversation w/ author Darcie Dennigan (SLATER ORCHARD: AN ETYMOLOGY, University of Alabama Press) to talk about their writing process and craft, followed by an audience Q&A and book signing!
FREE + OPEN TO ALL - 107 Ives St. Providence, RI
ABOUT THE BOOKS:
THE GRINGA:
Leonora Gelb came to Peru to make a difference. A passionate and idealistic Stanford grad, she left a life of privilege to fight poverty and oppression, but her beliefs are tested when she falls in with violent revolutionaries. While death squads and informants roam the streets and suspicion festers among the comrades, Leonora plans a decisive act of protest—until her capture in a bloody government raid, and a sham trial that sends her to prison for life.
Ten years later, Andres—a failed novelist turned expat—is asked to write a magazine profile of “La Leo.” As his personal life unravels, he struggles to understand Leonora, to reconstruct her involvement with the militants, and to chronicle Peru’s tragic history. At every turn he’s confronted by violence and suffering, and by the consequences of his American privilege. Is the real Leonora an activist or a terrorist? Cold-eyed conspirator or naïve puppet? And who is he to decide?
In this powerful and timely new novel, Andrew Altschul maps the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, author and text, resistance and extremism. Part coming-of-age story and part political thriller, The Gringa asks what one person can do in the face of the world’s injustice.
THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS:
For readers of Mohsin Hamid, Dave Eggers, Arundhati Roy, and Teju Cole, The Association of Small Bombs is an expansive and deeply humane novel that is at once groundbreaking in its empathy, dazzling in its acuity, and ambitious in scope
When brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, two Delhi schoolboys, pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed one day in 1996, disaster strikes without warning. A bomb—one of the many “small” bombs that go off seemingly unheralded across the world—detonates in the Delhi marketplace, instantly claiming the lives of the Khurana boys, to the devastation of their parents. Mansoor survives, bearing the physical and psychological effects of the bomb. After a brief stint at university in America, Mansoor returns to Delhi, where his life becomes entangled with the mysterious and charismatic Ayub, a fearless young activist whose own allegiances and beliefs are more malleable than Mansoor could imagine. Woven among the story of the Khuranas and the Ahmeds is the gripping tale of Shockie, a Kashmiri bomb maker who has forsaken his own life for the independence of his homeland.
Karan Mahajan writes brilliantly about the effects of terrorism on victims and perpetrators, proving himself to be one of the most provocative and dynamic novelists of his generation.
SLATER ORCHARD: AN ETYMOLOGY:
In Slater Orchard, a cleaning woman navigates a half-imaginary world ravaged by industrial waste and pollution. As she labors to grow pear trees in a dumpster, appearances unravel around and within her, and the orchard becomes a burial ground. We begin to question both the reliability of the narrator and of consensual reality.
With sharp wit and precise diction, Darcie Dennigan calls on and works in the lineage of great modernist women, from Clarice Lispector to Marie Redonnet. Slater Orchard is thoroughly contemporary in its themes, however, evincing dire questions of rampant capitalism and climate change that are rapidly changing our world and the exigencies of living in it.
ABOUT ANDREW ALTSHCUL:
Andrew Altschul is the author of the novels Lady Lazarus and Deus Ex Machina. His work has appeared in Esquire, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Best New American Voices, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and O. Henry Prize Stories. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Standrod University, he was the founding books editor at The Rumpus and is a Contributing Editor at Zyzzyva. He teaches at Colorado State University.
ABOUT KARAN MAHAJAN:
Karan Mahajan is the author of Family Planning, a finalist for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and The Association of Small Bombs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 National Book Award, won the 2017 Young Lions Fiction Award from the NYPL, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s "10 Best Books of 2016." In 2017, he was selected as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists. His reporting and criticism have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New Yorker Online, and other venues. He is an assistant professor at Brown University.
ABOUT DARCIE DENNIGAN:
Darcie Dennigan is an award-winning poet and playwright whose books include Madame X and The Parking Lot and other feral scenarios. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.