Author event with Lauren Groff

Parnassus Books, in partnership with Montgomery Bell Academy, are thrilled to present an evening with Lauren Groff, in conversation with Adam Ross, as they discuss Lauren's new book, Brawler: Stories.

This ticketed event will be held in Montgomery Bell Academy's Dead Poets Society Room, located in the Mary Helen Lowry Building (close to the South Wilson entrance). The event is on Thursday, February 26th and will begin at 6:30, with doors opening at 5:30.

Tickets:

Each ticket is $34.50 and includes one general admission seat and one signed copy of Brawler. Additional signed copies of Brawler along with a limited number of backlist titles, will be availsble for purchase. There will be a signing line for personalization directly following the event on stage.

Parking:

Parking is free on the MBA campus. There is a garage located at 205 South Wilson Boulevard (East side of MBA's campus). You may also park in the Vine Street Church parking lot or in any of the surface lots on campus.

About the book:

A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time

Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff's electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read together, they hum in exhilarating resonance. Ranging from the 1950s to the present day and moving across age, class, and region -- from New England to Florida to California -- these nine stories reflect and expand upon a shared theme: the ceaseless battle between humans' dark and light angels.

"In every human there is both an animal and a god wrestling unto death," one character tells us. Among those we see caught in this match are a young woman suddenly responsible for her disabled sibling, a hot-tempered high school swimmer in need of an adult, a mother blinded by the loss of her family, and a banking scion endowed with a different kind of inheritance. Motivated by love, impeded by the double edges of other peoples' good intentions, they try to do the right thing for as long as they can.

Precise, surprising, and provocative, anchored by profound insight into human nature, Brawler reveals the repeated, sometimes heartbreaking turning points between love and fear, compassion and violence, reason and instinct, altruism and what it takes to survive.

About the author:

Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and The New York Times-bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the celebrated short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies' Choice Award, France's Grand Prix de l'Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Her work has been translated into thirty-six languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she and her husband own the independent bookstore The Lynx.

About Adam Ross:

Adam Ross's most recent novel, Playworld, was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Town & Country, and People. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review. Born and raised in New York City, he's lived in Nashville, Tennessee since 1995.