Mayor's Book Club Community Discussion
Schedule
Mon Oct 21 2024 at 06:30 pm to 07:30 pm
UTC-05:00Location
Austin Central Library, Austin Public Library | Austin, TX
About this Event
The Library Foundation, Austin Public Library and the City of Austin Mayor’s Office have chosen “Wandering Stars” by best-selling author Tommy Orange as the 2024 Mayor’s Book Club selection.
The novel, published earlier this year, is a tender, shattering story of generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope. A citizen of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel There There, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer prize.
About “Wandering Stars”
Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Pr*son castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical Pr*son guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer.
Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.
In a novel that is by turns shattering and wondrous, Tommy Orange has conjured the ancestors of the family readers first fell in love with in “There There “— warriors, drunks, outlaws, addicts — asking what it means to bet the children and grandchildren of massacre.
About Tommy Orange
Tommy Orange is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel “There There,” a multigenerational, relentlessly paced story about a side of America few of us have ever seen: the lives of urban Native Americans. “There There” was longlisted for the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. “Wandering Stars” was published in February 2024.
Orange graduated from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was a 2014 MacDowell Fellow and a 2016 Writing by Writers Fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. He was born and raised in Oakland, California.
Where is it happening?
Austin Central Library, Austin Public Library, 710 West Cesar Chavez Street, Austin, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
