January & February
Mini Fest | February 19, 10:30 AM - 6 PM
All events take place in the Fenwick Reading Room, located in Fenwick Library on George Mason’s Fairfax Campus.
10:30 AM
A coming-of-age tale of male friendship and loneliness, the novel Great Disasters by Grady Chambers follows six young men from their Chicago high school years in the early 2000s through war, love, and heartbreak. Slipping between memories and adulthood, Chambers explores humor, hope, addiction, loss and more in this portrait of friends moving forward together and apart. Chicago Review of Books calls it “Tender and taut in its elegiac prose, Grady Chambers’s debut Great Disasters perfectly captures the surreal and frightening culture of the day, making Great Disasters a remarkable retrospective on the War on Terror era and the ways in which it ensnared and destroyed a generation.”
12 PM
Michael Regina’s graphic novel Deepwater Creek captures the horrors lurking in the depths of a local creek. When four friends gather for a final fishing trip before all going off to different schools, they snag something too terrifying to believe. Author Trevor Henderson calls it an “adventurous fishing trip downriver that gets swept off into Lovecraftian monster territory, with a cast of well-realized young characters fighting desperately to not become fish bait. Throw in beautiful watercolor art and a big beating heart beneath all the soggy mutants, and you have a real trophy winner!” Regina is also the author of The Sleepover.
1:30 PM
During the pandemic, Chinese and Chinese American women faced a double threat of illness and vitriolic racism. In its aftermath, folklorist Ziying You addresses this experience by examining gender, religion, community building, and more, alongside connections with historical and enduring racism. Author Solimar Otero, says, “Dealing with anti-Asian sentiments and violence fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic, Ziying You brings women and their families into focus to flesh out moments where the practice of folklore both harms and heals, eventually revealing the complexities of race, ethnicity, and gender in times of crisis.”
4:30 PM
Artist and author A. Kendra Greene guides readers to explore the wonder in the mundane, and engage with the unique and fascinating parts of this world in No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curiosity. In twenty-six illustrated essays, Greene embraces joy and the sublime in fantastical, yet real tales of exploding sharks, sentient bags of wasps, trees riding bicycles, and more. Author Amy Leach says, “I am so taken with A. Kendra Greene’s takenness with things—funny-looking dogs, delighted devils, monotremes, the toes of the Universe, beautiful frozen toilet water. Her intoxicating book does the opposite of diminishing the world, and it took me to new places. Like a train that spurns conventional stations, conventional tracks, this book plunges into the wild, trackless unknown.”
For the Love of the Gods: A Night of Romantasy
February 24, 7 PM
Romantasy fans unite for an evening of divine mythological mischief featuring Rachel Van Dyken, author of the Norse-inspired Fallen Gods, and Alysha Rameera, author of the Sri Lankan-inspired Her Soul for a Crown. The Fallen Gods are locked in human bodies, scattered across the world. When the daughter of the most ruthless of them attends an ancient and secretive university to steal back Mjolnir in order to save everyone she loves, she doesn’t count on the enemy’s heir getting in her way. Her Soul for a Crown is a slow-burn tale of a woman with an affinity for poisons who makes a dangerous deal with a cursed god in order to secure her revenge. Moderated by award-winning audiobook narrator, Kit Swann. Presented in Partnership with the City of Fairfax.
Podcast Episodes
January 13
Ashlee Cowles and Danielle Stinson, known collectively as A.D. Rhine, break down their epic duology about of the Trojan War: Horses of Fire, and the newest book, Daughters of Bronze. From the women working behind the scenes of the famous war depicted in The Illiad, to the modern research and retellings, Cowles and Stinson demonstrate their passion and knowledge for the subject, as well as the secrets behind their co-authorship success.
February 10
Love gets a second chance after fifteen long years in Jenn Bouchard’s Considering Us, set in Boston and along the New Hampshire coast. When private chef Devon Paige is embroiled in a scandal partly of her own making, she gets a job at an elite boarding school where she’s shocked to see an old flame. In this episode of the Fall for the Book podcast, Bouchard talks beloved romance tropes and Rom Coms, delicious food and bookish drinks, and the power of place.