Events
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Start: 12:30 pm
Special midday at Elliott Bay reading. Joining us for this welcome Elliott Bay return for this special, lunch hour reading and signing is novelist Thomas Mullen. His Northwest-set debut novel, The Last Town on Earth, received several best 'first book' citations, and has continued to go into new readers' hands here as a strong word-of-mouth favorite. He returns with an awaited new novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (Random House). "At the start of Mullen's compelling second novel, set during the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover's war on crime in the 1930s, violent bank robbers Jason and Whit Fireson (aka the Firefly Brothers) wake up in an Indiana morgue, having miraculously survived bullet wounds that led the authorities to triumphantly announce their deaths. The pair escape ... This is but the first of a number of fantastic episodes in which the criminals cheat death ... Mullen makes the despair of the Great Depression palpable, as his antiheroes become folk icons to the downtrodden people of the Midwest resentful of a government that can't help them." – Publishers Weekly. Please check with the Elliott Bay Café at (206) 682-6664, www.elliottbaycafe.com by Tuesday, February 16 for special box-lunch options available as part of this program.
Start: 7:00 pm
--PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE FOR THIS EVENT!--
Seattle poet Laura McKee, a University of Washington MFA graduate, a recipient of awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and the Jackstraw Foundation along the way, reads tonight from her recently published debut collection, Uttermost Paradise Place (The American Poetry Review). This book is itself a prize—chosen for the prestigious APR/Honickman First Book Prize. "... the poems in Uttermost Paradise Place achieve transparency. While many of them are perceived via a persona, it is ultimately the personae of perception itself that proscribes the pure pleasure of reading ... Charting a humor of consequence—hell is perpetually in this book and it is the Greek hell, where re-birth occurs—Laura McKee creates a poetics of call and response, but not in the traditional sense, as in poet to reader, chorus leader to singers, etc. These poems call to each other, syllable by syllable, and they are so pleased with the circuitry of sound and sense that readers—if they just give themselves away to the pleasure of being exactly nowhere but in the unscripted place all authentic poetry provides—will experience the paradise the book proposes." – Claudia Keelan, from the Introduction.
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