Saturday, April 4, 2020

Literature
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  1:00 p.m.
  Prairie Lights Bookstore

Indie Showcase: Sarah Rose Etter + Matt Bell

Reading + Book Signing

Venue: Prairie Lights Bookstore

Date: Saturday, April 4

Doors: 12:00 p.m.

Admission: FREE and open to the public

ABOUT SARAH ROSE ETTER

[This woman] is unapologetically bold.“—-Bustle

Sarah Rose Etter is the author of two books, most recently The Book of X (Two Dollar Radio). Her fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in VICE, Guernica, The Cut, Gulf Coast, Philadelphia Weekly, and more. She is the recipient of writing residencies at the Disquiet International Program in Lisbon and the Gullkistan Residency in Iceland. She has served as an arts columnist at Philadelphia Weekly and The Austin Chronicle, as well as a contributing editor at The Fanzine, where she edited and published that notorious interview with Ottessa Moshfegh.

ABOUT THE BOOK
A surreal exploration of one woman’s life and death against a landscape of meat, office desks, and bad men.

The Book of X tells the tale of Cassie, a girl born with her stomach twisted in the shape of a knot. From childhood with her parents on the family meat farm, to a desk job in the city, to finally experiencing love, she grapples with her body, men, and society, all the while imagining a softer world than the one she is in. Twining the drama of the everyday—school-age crushes, paying bills, the sickness of parents—with the surreal—rivers of thighs, men for sale and fields of throats—Cassie’s realities alternate to create a blurred, fantastic world of haunting beauty.

ABOUT MATT BELL

Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House/William Morrow in 2021. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a nonfiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.

ABOUT THE BOOK
Detroit has descended into ruin. Kelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of the city known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly avenges the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past and long-buried traumas.

The second novel from the acclaimed author of In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love?