Join us for an evening of fiction with a trio of authors presenting their new books from UC’s Acre Books.
About Defiant Acts
James Stewart III’s powerful debut novel documents the life of a working-class interracial couple and their children in a Chicago suburb in the early 1990s. Rooted in the tradition of Black authors from Chicago and drawing on the author’s own experiences, Defiant Acts eschews a conventional plot, presenting a series of captured moments—past and present—and multiple perspectives to build a mosaic of the family’s lives. In clear, concise prose, Stewart focuses on the complexities of human relationships and on race relations both in and outside the domestic space, placing emphasis on the values that bind this tight-knit family together: solidarity, care, and hope.
About Special Election
In Special Election, ingenious fictions target our all-too-familiar preoccupations and vulnerabilities—belonging, (dis)engagement, the struggle for self-worth, the difficulty of loving and being loved, the banality and absurdity of existence. Brock Clarke’s rapier wit, inexhaustible imagination, and brilliant leaps of illogic transform his characters’ desperation and distress into tragicomic delight.
About Range of Motion
Twin A and Twin B. That’s what Michael and Sal’s neuroscientist father irreverently calls them. The boys are born moments apart, but baby Sal’s brain scan shows a bleed. He has severe cerebral palsy and intellectual disabilities. Told through multiple perspectives—Gabe, the boys’ father; Hannah, their mother; and Michael—this debut novel follows the Mitchell family from the boys’ infancy to the cusp of adulthood as they all try to interpret what Sal, who speaks only eight words, is thinking and feeling. Transforming perceptions of disability and interdependence through tender attention to detail, Range of Motion is wrenching, beautiful, and sharply comic.
6 pm reception/6:30 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.
Copies will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.
You may also like the following events from The Mercantile Library:
- Next Tuesday, 29th July, 06:00 pm, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar: An Evening with Katie Yee in Cincinnati
- Next Wednesday, 30th July, 05:00 pm, On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports An Evening with Christine Brennan in Cincinnati
- This September, 16th September, 06:00 pm, Destroy This House: An Evening with Amanda Uhle in conversation with Yalie Saweda Kamara in Cincinnati
Also check out other
Arts events in Cincinnati,
Literary Art events in Cincinnati,
Sports events in Cincinnati.
