Join us for an off-site reading and book signing at BJ's Lounge (4301 Burgundy St. in the Bywater), with author Laura Adamczyk, featuring her debut novel, ISLAND CITY. The event will include readings by Laura and local writers Caro Clark, Tia Clark, Mik Grantham, Annell López, and Joshua Wheeler. Octavia Books will be on-site to sell copies of ISLAND CITY to be signed by the author
A woman spills the story of her life to a bar full of strangers, in the acerbic first novel from Laura Adamczyk.
Anything can become the story of your life if you let it, and I suppose this became mine.
In ISLAND CITY, a wry, wistful woman, estranged from her family, sells her belongings and moves back to her hometown in the Midwest. To her, it’s the “perfect place to give up.” She wants to get rid of everything—her stuff, her ambitions. Before making a “messy exit,” she holes up in a dark bar and tells her stories to an audience of indifferent strangers. There’s the time the river dried up and you could walk across its bed; the day her sister got clobbered at the nursing home; when her dad got cancer, then Alzheimer’s, then cancer again. Now she’s forgetting things the way he did, words slipping away. That third drink isn’t helping.
Laura Adamczyk, whose writing is “super weird” and “super unsettling” (Eugenia Williamson, The Boston Globe), creates a full portrait of a person, even as the image blurs and fades. Delivered as a booze-soaked monologue, Island City is a funny, devastating first novel, one that bristles and burns with true feeling.
Laura Adamczyk is the author of the short story collection Hardly Children and the novel Island City. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in 4 Columns, the Chicago Reader, Guernica, McSweeney's, and other publications. She lives in Chicago.
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Please pre-order a copy now to be signed by the author. If you wish to pick up your copy at the event, select "store pickup" at checkout and then use the comment box to write "pickup at event at BJ's Lounge." If you are not able to attend but would like a signed copy, select a pickup or delivery option and write "signed copy, not attending" in the comment box.
"The stories are achingly open to the vulnerability that comes with forming attachments and the surprising difficulty of breaking them." —Danielle Lazarin, The New York Times Book Review
"A striking blend of graceful sentences and eerie premises." —Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune
