In-Store: Small Press Spotlight: Unnamed Press Debut Authors

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured books or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the books will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/QCZQeHz7M_8
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact ZXZlbnRoZWxwIHwgYm9va3NhcmVtYWdpYyAhIG5ldA==.

Sister Creatures:

In the muggy, insect-ridden town of Pinecreek, Louisiana, college dropout Tess Lavigne is watching two bickering siblings while their parents are away. Her listless day drinking is interrupted when someone emerges from the woods behind the house. Filthy and feral, the daughter of religious fundamentalists, the girl known in town as Sister Gail convinces Tess to take her in for the night. The strange events of that evening will set the course for Tess’s future, and Sister Gail’s ultimate fate.

Meanwhile, other residents of Pinecreek try to cobble together a future from what little they have, their lives intersecting in small and not-so-small ways. Sisters fight to define independence for themselves (and from each other), while two young women on a bicycling trip wonder what their relationship promises, or threatens. Throughout, a deeply unsettling presence connects the characters to the buried secrets of Pinecreek: the ominous Thea, a malevolent shape-shifting entity whose rage and despair stems from a tragic history of misogyny, maternal loss, and stolen ambitions.

As time marches forward, so does Tess, creating a new path for herself while accepting what can never be entirely left behind. At times atmospheric and eerie, and at others all too real, Sister Creatures is about manufacturing resilience from nothing but the bonds that tie us together.

Thank you, John:

Michelle, a queer, wanna-be writer exasperated by student loans, bad teeth, and the poor decisions of her loveable sitcom-worthy family, believes a sugar daddy is written in her density as firmly as she believes her idol, Alanis Morissette, holds the musical blueprint to the life she desires most.

With a salt-of-the-earth Chicano father who's convinced aliens will eventually rule the world, a white mother who maxes out her credit cards on fast food, and a sugar-hyped 7-year-old nephew, Michelle diagnoses herself as self-parentified with a core mistrust in the world’s unreliability. Left to her own devices and barely making ends meet, she turns to the world of stripping until her chance for financial freedom arrives in the form of John, a lonely older man who offers her a weekly pile of cash for lively conversation and sex. She will keep her family, and only her family, availed of all the gritty details.

Grateful and convinced by the immediate improvement money makes in her life, sugaring takes the role of any other exploitative job in America– the physical wear and tear, competition between colleagues, the crossed personal boundaries, dangerous power imbalances, and the reliance on hierarchy to keep only the rich and powerful rich and powerful — it’s just a lot more intimate. A worthy sacrifice, right?

Looking back at her time as a 24-year-old stripper and sugarbaby, struggling to pull herself–and her entire family–out of poverty, Gurule grins and bears it all in a tragi-comedy of errors: heartbreak, complete social isolation and self-denial, glares at The Cheesecake Factory, cringey sex, and scheme after scheme for a better life with everything money can buy.

Zone Rouge:

Ferrand Martin and his team of démineurs spend their days in the ruined fields of Zone Rouge on the periphery of modern day Verdun, France where they clean up the artillery and explosives used in World War I. One bullet, one bit of shrapnel, one bomb at a time. The work, they say, is not measured in days, months, or years, but in generations. It’s taken a century to get this far, and it will take many more centuries to complete.

One morning, a routine call to pick up a half-buried artillery shell turns out to be much more than just a single missile: they discover a human skeleton, fully intact. Ferrand and his fellow démineurs dig deep into poisoned soil to reveal the past is rarely ever distant from the present.

This startling discovery kicks off a series of events that sees the usually desolate Zone Rouge teem with activity as academics, politicians, and locals all wrangle over the legacy of the War and what it means to remember. Zone Rouge is a brilliant reimagining of the Sisyphus myth suffused with our contemporary anxieties over war, climate, class, and the ghosts of our pasts.

Laura Venita Green holds an MFA in fiction and translation from Columbia University, where she was an undergraduate teaching fellow. Her fiction won the Story Foundation Prize and has appeared in Story, the Missouri Review, Joyland, and Fatal Flaw. She grew up in Germany and rural Louisiana and currently lives with her husband in New York City. Sister Creatures is her debut novel.

Michelle Gurule is a writer and educator based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Michelle earned her M.F.A. in Creative Nonfiction from the University of New Mexico in 2021. Her creative work has appeared in Electric Literature, Slate, HuffPost Personals, The Offing, Joyland, and explores the complexities of sex work, class, power and Michelle’s intersectional identity as a queer, white / Chicana woman. Thank You, John is her debut memoir.

Michael Jerome Plunkett is a writer from Long Island, a Marine Corps veteran, and former EMT. He is the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Literature of War Foundation and host of The LitWar Podcast. Zone Rouge is his debut novel.

Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels The Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He lives in New York City.

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