Loading Events

« All Events

2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series

Inprint Katie Kitamura & Karen Russell Reading

Monday April 14, 2025 7:30 pm

Where

Alley Theatre
615 Texas Avenue
Houston, TX 77002
+ Google Map

TICKETS: $5 general admission tickets on sale 12 pm Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Katie Kitamura and Karen Russell will read from their new novels Audition and The Antidote. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2024/2025 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series

Katie Kitamura is, according to Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker, “a writer with a visionary, visual imagination and a bold symbolist streak.” She is the author of four acclaimed novels, including A Separation, Gone to The Forest, The Longshot, and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and winner of the Prix Litteraire Lucien Barriere. Her other works include a travelogue, Japanese for Travellers: A Journey Through Modern Japan, and art criticism. She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature and a Lannan Foundation fellowship, and her work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Kitamura joins us with her new book Audition a novel that twists the two narratives of an accomplished actress and a troubled youth into a compulsively readable story. Hernan Diaz writes, “Audition challenges our preconceptions about love, art, and selfhood…. If all the world’s a stage, Kitamura reminds us that we never stop auditioning for our parts.”

Karen Russell, the New York Times bestselling author of the novel Swamplandia! and the story collections Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Orange World, and St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, is according to NPRarguably our greatest fantasist writing serious fiction today.” A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow and finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Russell’s “ability to give weird and creepy shape to what might otherwise remain dark corners of the human psyche is refreshing” (Los Angeles Review of Books). According to the Washington Post, “we are in the hands of a master.” Russell joins us to read from and talk about her new novel The Antidote. Set in the mythical town of Uz, Nebraska, during the Dust Bowl, the story follows a cast of characters, including a “Prairie Witch” who keeps the secrets and memories of her fellow townspeople. Kaveh Akbar writes, “Only Karen Russell could write a dust bowl opus with such raucous brio—The Antidote soars with exigent joy and laugh-out-loud scenes. It’s magic, propulsive, [and] eminently readable.”

Brenda Peynado‘s latest book, Time’s Agent, about a disgraced time agent on one last mission for redemption, was one of Amazon Editors’ and Book Riot’s best books of August. Her genre-bending short story collection, The Rock Eaters—featuring Latina girlhood, basement ghosts, alien arrivals, angels falling from rooftops, virtual reality, and sorrows manifesting as tumorous stones—was named one of NPR, the New York Public Library, and Electric Literature’s best books of 2021. She teaches at the University of South Florida.

Calendar powered by The Events Calendar