BookPeople Presents: Karen Olsson - Dear Thorns

Format:

• This event is free and open to the public.
• Location: The 2nd floor of BookPeople.
• Run time: 45-60 minute discussion, followed by a signing line.

Signing Guidelines:

• To get a book signed, a copy of the event book or an item of equal value must be purchased from BookPeople.
• The author will be personalizing copies of the book.
• For high volume events, post-talk signing lines can become very long. Signing line placement is determined on a first-come, first-served basis.

General Info:

• Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis and is not guaranteed.
• If you have any accessibility concerns, please contact [email protected]

• If you have any other questions, please visit our Eventbrite FAQ. If your question isn't covered in the FAQ, feel free to email us at [email protected].
• BookPeople reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary.
• There will not be a live stream or recording available.
• All event guidelines are subject to change.

About the book:

For fans of Dana Spiotta's Wayward and Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies we follow Lora, a wildlife refuge worker in South Texas who gets tangled up in a romantic relationship with a much younger male intern.

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 is awakened in Lora that has long been dormant.

As Lora and Ben track the beautiful, almost mystical animal, tensions arise on the refuge. Lora’s boss strategizes about how to turn part of the refuge into a hunting destination; an eccentric artist and rancher pitches an unconventional scheme to help the ocelots; and Lora and Ben make a series of impulsive, inappropriate choices. Along the way, the reader learns about Lora’s professional and romantic history—the story of a woman dedicated to her career—and is immersed in the world of the ranchlands just above the Texas-Mexico border, home to a distinct mix of species: animal, plant, and human.

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.

About the author:

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.

About the moderator:

Jill Meyers is the editorial director of A Strange Object, an imprint that publishes award-winning fiction and nonfiction. Her writers have received wide acclaim and honors, including the Whiting Award, The Believer Book Award, and the Discovery Award from the Writers’ League of Texas, and have been named Finalist in Fiction for the National Book Award. She oversees editorial for a new venture between the Texas Book Festival and Deep Vellum. Formerly, Jill worked on staff at Texas Monthly. An avid home cook, she writes the Thursday Supper Club newsletter for Bookshop.org. She lives in Austin with her family and their incorrigible basset hound.

By purchasing a book from BookPeople, you are not only supporting a local, independent business – you’re showing publishers that they should continue sending authors to BookPeople.

Thank you for supporting Karen Olsson, Jill Meyers, and your local independent bookstore!