Normally we post about upcoming tour stops for the coming week, but we have a down week this week, so instead I’d like to show you what we’ve got in store for the next few months!
Zig-Zagging: Loving Madly, Losing Badly by Tom Wilson
For decades Ziggy has fostered a strong, personal connection with millions of readers, and now the man who has been the driving force behind Ziggy for more than two decades shares the dramatic and multidimensional story behind the enigmatic and complex world of cartooning. In this compelling narrative filled with humor, heartache, hope, original artwork, and family photos, Wilson shares his personal recollections as a boy who witnessed the whimsical creation of a future American icon, until adulthood thrusts him into the position of clandestine creative caretaker for Ziggy after his brilliant father, Tom Wilson Sr., becomes chronically ill. When his wife is taken by cancer and leaves him alone to raise two young sons, Wilson must reconcile his anger and paralyzing depression over his devastating loss, while continuing to bring smiles to others around the world in his daily comics. Read more.
The Mechanics of Falling by Catherine Brady
This book presents eleven new stories that are set in and around San Francisco by an award-winning author. The stories in this collection explore those moments when the seemingly fixed coordinates of our lives abruptly give way – when mother love fractures, a faithful husband abandons his family, a conscientious middle-class life implodes, or loyalty demands an excruciating sacrifice. The characters share a fundamental predicament, the struggle to name and embrace some faith that can break their fall. In equal measure, they hunger for and resist this elusive possibility and what it demands of them. “The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories” deals with a range of circumstances and relationships, and with characters who must decide what they are willing to risk for the sake of transformation, or for the right to refuse it. The stories trace the effort to traverse the boundaries between one state and another – between conviction and self-doubt, recklessness and despair, resignation and rebellion. And each story propels the reader to imagine what will happen next, to register the unfinished and always precarious quality of every life. Read more.
Tea and Other Ayama Na Takes by Eleanor Bluestein
The ten stories in Tea and other Ayama Na Tales take place in the fictional country of Ayama Na, a small Southeast Asian nation recovering from a devastating internal coup and a long drought, both of which have left the population reeling.
During the coup and its aftermath, roughly a quarter of the population died, including (because they were targeted for extinction) almost all of the country’s artists, intellectuals, musicians, writers, poets and teachers. Land mines pock the countryside, amputees beg on the streets, and in this fledgling democracy, graft and corruption infect every level of government. Read more.
The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
Faith, I tell them, is a mystery, elusive to many, and never easy to explain. Sweeping and lyrical, spellbinding and unforgettable, David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife combines epic historical fiction with a modern murder mystery to create a brilliant novel of literary suspense. It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife. Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death. And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith. Read more.
TLC Book Tours 