Friday, August 8, 7:30 PM, (7 door): Free concert! Novelist and Folk Singer Willy Vlautin, and Miriam Gershow: Reading, Talk, Folk Concert and Book-Signing Celebrating the Paperback Release of Willy’s Novel “The Horse” and Miriam’s new Novel “Closer.”
FREE!
Willy’s September 2024 Event celebrating the hardcover release of “Horse” here at Tsunami was 55 minutes of as good a mix of books, storytelling and music as it gets. We asked him back for the paperback release, and he has graciously accepted.
Miriam teaches here at the U of O. Two of her previous books have been short-listed for the Oregon Book Award.
We are thrilled to bring these two together for an evening of diverse reading and friendship.
Light refreshments.
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Willy Vlautin, of Scappoose, Oregon is the author of the novels The Motel Life, Northline, Lean on Pete, The Free, Don't Skip Out on Me, and The Night Always Comes. He is the founding member of the bands Richmond Fontaine and The Delines.
“"Like John Steinbeck and Raymond Carver before him, Vlautin excels at telling deeply felt stories about characters who are down on their luck. The Horse is a textbook Vlautin novel in all the best ways. . . . Told in spare prose, unsentimental but sincere, The Horse is a moving paean to the healing power of animals and music--and a damn good yarn, too." -- Esquire, Best Books of Summer 2024
Publisher Marketing:
"Willy Vlautin writes about people overlooked by society and overlooked by literature. In The Horse, he tells the story of a tenderhearted man who has a steady talent and a crushing addiction. It is both a work of extraordinary compassion and a really great novel." -- Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake
"A moving tale of suffering and redemption, The Horse portrays the immense gravity of what it takes to be human in tough times, and the elusive grace that might just be grasped from music, animals, and memory." -- Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of Horse
Award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores loneliness, art, regret, and hard-won empathy in this poignant novel--his most personal to date--that captures the life of a journeyman musician unable to escape the tragedies of his past.
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Willy playing with The Delines
Set in 2015 during Obama’s presidency and Trump’s early candidacy, the tranquil college town of Horace, Oregon, is disrupted when white students taunt a Black student in the high school library. This incident sparks immediate repercussions that ripple through the community, affecting students, families, and faculty alike. Woody, the school’s guidance counselor, finds himself thrust into the spotlight after years on the sidelines. Lark, a struggling student, grapples with the fallout as her relationships are reshaped by the incident. Stefanie, a conflicted parent, struggles to balance protecting her child with allowing him to find his own path. Friendships are strained, marriages are tested, and families face the threat of sudden violence. When tragedy strikes with the death of a student, the survivors are left grappling with the fault lines in their most intimate relationships and searching for ways to draw closer.
Closer explores themes of community, resilience, and the impacts of individual actions on collective destinies, offering a poignant reflection on how individuals grapple with their lives amidst societal challenges and personal reckonings.
Praise for Closer
“Miriam Gershow has written a novel of tremendous insight, unflinching realism, and transcendent generosity. Closer will keep you up late turning pages while its vivid and complex characters take up permanent residence in your head and heart. Bravo!”
—Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth To Mouth
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Miriam Gershow is the author of Closer (Regal House), Survival Tips: Stories (Propeller Books), and The Local News (Spiegel & Grau). Miriam’s stories appear in The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast and Black Warrior Review, among other journals. Her flash fiction appears in anthologies from Alan Squire Books, Alternating Currents, and Fractured Lit, as well as many journals, including Pithead Chapel, Had, and Variant Lit. Her creative nonfiction is featured in Salon and Craft Literary among other journals.
Miriam’s writing has been called “unusually credible and precise" and "deftly heartbreaking” by The New York Times. She is the recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Oregon Literary Fellowship, an Independent Publisher Book Award, and a Pencraft Award. She is a two-time finalist for the Oregon Book Awards’ Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and has been awarded writing residencies at Playa, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Hypatia-in-the-Woods, and Wildacres.
She received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and has since taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She has taught writing to first-graders, retirees, and everyone in between. She is the organizer of 100 Notable Small Press Books, a curated list of the year’s recommended titles across genres from independent publishers. Miriam lives with her family in Eugene OR, where she teaches writing at the University of Oregon.