Nina Schulyer Discusses Open the Floodgates
About this Event
We are delighted to welcome Nina Schuyler to Bookshop West Portal to celebrate her new novel, Open the Floodgates. As a renowned novelist and teacher of creative writing at Stanford's Continuing Studies program, Nina delivers a magical, genre-defying novel that is a poignant commentary on our climate crisis and that is infused with such compassion.
This event is FREE to attend. Seating is first-come, first-served. (RSVPs are optional, but encouraged for our planning purposes.)
You don't need to have read the book beforehand to enjoy the event, but we do recommend reserving your copy ahead of time:
About the Book:
We are in the midst of a profound legal shift: from New Zealand to India to Ecuador, real-world laws have granted personhood to rivers. With a mix of magic and pathos, OPEN THE FLOODGATES imagines this new reality with a new configuration of the human and other-than-human relationship.
In an unnamed California town, the River is granted personhood and has the right–-and urgent need–-to argue in court for its existence. But powerful, well-funded enemies are determined to keep the River exactly as it is: gunk-filled, toxic, a convenient dumping ground for waste. The story moves like water, entering the minds of the town’s people, pigeons, deer, dogs, cats, the trees, the River’s home, and the River itself. When the River moves, the text winds its way along the page, mimicking water. When the River is ultimately jailed, the town faces a reckoning: what do we owe the River? And the River must answer in turn: what, if anything, does it owe humans?
About the Author:
Nina Schuyler’s short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, the W.S. Porter Prize for Short Story Collections, and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. It was also a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. Her novel, Afterword, won the Foreword INDIE Book of the Year Award for Literary and Science Fiction and was selected as part of San Francisco’s One City One Book program. Her novel, The Translator, won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for General Fiction and was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. Her novel, The Painting, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award
Agenda
🕑: 06:30 PM - 07:00 PM
Buy the book, browse the shelves, snag your seat!
🕑: 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Hear from the author + Q&A
🕑: 08:00 PM - 08:30 PM
Signing Line - Get your copy personalized by the author
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 0.00
