Karen Olsson - DEAR THORNS
Featured Book
Dear thorns: a novel
"A wildlife refuge worker in South Texas who gets tangled up in a romantic relationship with a much younger male intern"-- Provided by publisher.
This book will be available for purchase at the event.
About This Event
Join Texas author Karen Olsson on Thursday, November 5 as she discusses her new book Dear Thorns. Karen will be in conversation with Texas Monthly executive editor Mimi Swartz. Lora has worked at the wildlife refuge in South Texas for seven years, trapping and studying the elusive Texas ocelot. Interns come and go, but when Ben arrives, something in Lora breaks loose.Much as she wishes she could devote all her time to the elusive animals, Lora is saddled with office work, her new boss wants to turn the refuge into a hunting destination, and her attraction to Ben gets the better of her. Along the way, she recalls the sacrifices she's made for her career and navigates the distinctive terrain she's come to think of as home: the ranchlands just above the Texas-Mexico border.With sharp prose and subtle humor, critically-acclaimed writer Karen Olsson mines the gulf between youth and middle age and reckons with the ecological disaster of species loss. Her novel illuminates how the things we do to wild animals—isolating them, reducing their habitats, disconnecting them from other groups—are all things we seem to do to ourselves. Brainy, elegant, and deeply engrossing, Dear Thorns is a portrait of a woman’s idealism in a compromised world. Karen Olsson is the author of the novels Waterloo, which was a runner-up for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction, and All the Houses, as well as the nonfiction work The Weil Conjectures. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Slate, Bookforum, and Texas Monthly, among other publications, and she was an editor of The Texas Observer. She graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics and lives in Austin, Texas with her family. Mimi Swartz is a long-time staff writer at Texas Monthly, and a two-time National Magazine Award winner and a two-time finalist. The co-author of the national bestseller Power Failure, with Sherron Watkins, about the failures at Enron, she is also the author of Ticker, the Quest to Create an Artificial Heart. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Esquire, Slate, and she has been a contributing Op-Ed writer for the New York Times.
About the Venue
Brazos Bookstore
Houston's oldest independent bookstore, operating since 1974. We are a general bookstore with a curated inventory in fiction, poetry, romance, horror, graphic novels, works in translation, history, media studies, local interest, and children's books. Brazos hosts or participates in over 300 events a year, in-store and with some of Houston's premiere cultural and educational organizations, such as Inprint, Performing Arts Houston, Asia Society, Rice University, and University of Houston.
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Story Time ft. Kat Hyde
Join us every Saturday morning for a special story time, perfect for ages 2-5, but all ages are welcome!
Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan and Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan - BIRD/DOG
Brazos welcomes Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan and Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan on Monday, October 26 to discuss their book Bird/Dog. The authors will be in conversation with DaQuon Wilson. What does home mean to you? Is it a place where you are safe? The freedom to go wherever you please? Or the people who understand you?High above, Bird roams the open sky but dreams of having a home. Down below, Dog has a family, yet longs to discover life beyond the fence. When their separate adventures lead them away from everything familiar, both must navigate uncertainty, new relationships and the surprising ways in which friendship can appear.Told through two very different perspectives, Bird/Dog is a warm and hopeful story about freedom, belonging, individuality and finding your place in the world.Copies of Bird/Dog will be available for purchase at the event. Mrinalini Levin-Srinivasan is a student at Lanier Middle School in Houston, Texas. A highly motivated young writer, Mrinalini benefited from the isolation of the pandemic years, when she found herself reading for hours daily. She is currently a Speech and Debate Team Captain, Lanier Leader, and member of the National Junior Honors Society. She has won numerous writing and speaking competitions at the University Interscholastic League and is the founder of a Banned Books Club. Mrinalini has studied bharatanatyam, Carnatic music, and the clarinet, and is a competitive swimmer with HTX Swims. She has lived in six U.S. states and two countries.Shobha Tharoor Srinivasan is an award-winning author of 15 books for children and adults, published in India and the United States, and the recipient of India’s 2022 National Film Award for Best Narration. Her acclaimed works include It’s Time to Rhyme, winner of PublishingNext’s Children’s Book of the Year 8+ (2022), and Prince with a Paintbrush: The Story of Raja Ravi Varma. She writes fiction, nonfiction, poetry and picture books, with her work appearing in international journals and anthologies. A frequent speaker at literary festivals, Shobha divides her time between California and India, drawing on her cross-cultural experiences as a proud global citizen.DaQuon Wilson is a PhD student in the English department at Rice University, where he studies African American and Black Diasporic literature with an emphasis on children’s literature and social justice. Before coming to Rice, DaQuon worked with Scholastic Book Clubs and earned a B.A. from Emory University.
The Living Read Book Club
Join us every month for a ghastly good time, open to all who seek to explore the darkest regions of fiction. Our lead buyer and hopeless horror nerd Keaton curates and conducts this newest addition to our book group offerings—THE LIVING READ! Monsters, ghosts, murderers, and more await all who descend into this literary lair of horrors. And perhaps you’ll even find the authors of these nightmarish works themselves lurking among the shadows!September's book is The Final Girl Support Group and we will be joined by author Grady Hendrix. This event will be hosted on Zoom. Click here to register. Click here to view our main Living Read Book Club page.Use Coupon Code BOOKCLUB to get the 15% book club discount!