In-Store: Nora Lange: Us Fools w/ Claire Donato

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/ciTt4DVB6qo
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

A tragicomic, intimate American story of two precocious sisters coming of age during the Midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s.
Joanne and Bernadette Fareown are raised on their family farm in rural Illinois, keenly affected by their parents’ volatile relationship and mounting financial debt, haunted by the cursed history of the women in their family. Largely left to their own devices, the sisters educate themselves on Greek mythology, feminism, and Virginia Woolf, realizing they must find unique ways to cope in these antagonistic conditions, questioning the American Dream as the rest of the country abandons their community in crisis.
As Jo and Bernie’s imaginative solutions for escape come up short against their parents’ realities, the family leaves their farm for Chicago, where Joanne—free-spirited, reckless, and unable to tame her inner violence—rebels in increasingly desperate ways. After her worst breakdown yet, Jo goes into exile in Deadhorse, Alaska, and it is up to Bernadette to use all she’s learned from her sister to revive a sense of hope against the backdrop of a failing world.
With her debut novel, Nora Lange has crafted a rambunctious, ambitious, and heart-rending portrait of two idiosyncratic sisters, determined to persevere despite the worst that capitalism and their circumstances has to throw at them.

Nora Lange's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Hazlitt, Joyland, American Short Fiction, Denver Quarterly, HTMLGiant, LIT, The Fairy Tale Review, and elsewhere. Her project Dailyness was longlisted for the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers. She received her MFA from Brown University's Literary Arts Program where she was a Kaplan Fellow, and she will be a 2024 fellow at the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. An earlier iteration of her novel Us Fools was shortlisted for The Novel Prize in 2020, a prize to recognize and publish novels that explore and expand the possibilities of the form. She comes from a long line of Midwestern farmers and lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Claire Donato‘s writing—at once ambient, investigative, and cathartic—collates forms and materials. She is the author of three books, most recently Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts (Archway Editions, 2023). Recent work has been published or is forthcoming in Parapraxis, Forever, The Chicago Review, The End, Oversound, The Brooklyn Rail, Fence, and GoldFlakePaint. Currently, she works as Acting Chairperson of Writing at Pratt Institute, where she received the 2020 Distinguished Teacher Award. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat Woebegone.

Host or Publisher Books Are Magic