Ilana Masad presents BEINGS with Laura Warrell and Greg Mania

Sunny's Bookshop - Located inside our floral shop Shades of Petals (Tarzana, CA)

Join us to celebrate Ilana Masad's latest novel BEINGS! Ilana will be in conversation with Laura Warrell and Greg Mania for this special night of reading, signing, and Q&A.

ABOUT "BEINGS"

Named a "Most Anticipated Book" by the LA Times, Washington Post, Autostraddle, and Town and Country

From the celebrated author of All My Mother's Lovers, a new novel based on true events asks whether extraterrestrial life might be what ties us to one another, to history, and to reality itself.

“Ilana Masad is an exciting talent."-Garth Greenwell“Masad is a writer on the rise."-Kristen Arnett

In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. Unintentionally, a genre was born: the alien abduction narrative.

In Ilana Masad's Beings, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads: Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Masad explores the pair's trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness, and alienation in the repressive 1960s-as well as the joy of finding community. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis's letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

Over the course of a decade, Phyllis wrestles with her desires and ambitions as a lesbian writer, while the abducted couple grapple with how to maintain control of their narrative. All the while, the archive shatters and reforms, redefining fact and fiction via the stories left behind by the abductees, Phyllis, and the Archivist themself. Masad makes human what is alien and makes tangible what is hidden – sometimes by chance and sometimes intentionally – in the archive.

ABOUT ILANA MASAD

Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism whose work has been widely published. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother's Lovers and is co-editing the forthcoming anthology Here For All the Reasons: #BachelorNation’s Franchise Fascination.

ABOUT LAURA WARRELL

Laura Warrell is the author of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Lit Hub, Los Angeles Review of Books, Huffington Post, and other publications. Laura has attended residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University.

ABOUT GREG MANIA

Greg Mania is a writer whose words have been published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, HuffPost, and elsewhere. He is the author of the celebrated debut memoir, Born to Be Public, which was named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, among others. He lives in Los Angeles, where he co-hosts Empty Trash, a bi-monthly reading series.

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