In-Store: Devyn Defoe: Burnside w/ Avigayl Sharp

Event guidelines: * 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/fpTs5z-_ZDs * 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 eventhelp@booksaremagic.net. A Lynchian, absurdist debut novel for fans of Joy Williams and Emma Cline about two disaffected young women and the local homeless man they become obsessed with. The Bowl is a strange place: Surrounded by abandoned almond orchards filled with feral children and neighboring towns that keep burning down, the polluted, riverside city has a decades-old web of serial killers and missing people. Our unnamed narrator, a bookseller at a used bookstore, and her roommate September, a waitress at a cowgirl-themed breasturant, spend their days avoiding their deadbeat boyfriends, commuting to class on the raccoon-infested ‘rat bus,’ and hanging out at wine bars with their friend Claudia Thursday. But after September has an encounter with a local homeless man named Burnside, she becomes terrified that he’s stalking her. Soon, the entire town has turned on Burnside, convinced that he is responsible for the violence, precarity, and wildfires that surround them. Burnside builds a dreamlike yet utterly propulsive tapestry of brilliant, flawed, and dangerous characters. A commentary on victimhood and safety, both real and imagined, the cruelty of late-stage capitalism and climate disaster, the brutal contradictions of patriarchy and quotidian humiliations of girlhood, and a fiercely imagined portrait of a California seemingly right next to our own, Burnside is a singular, epic, and wonderfully strange debut. Devyn Defoe is a writer and bookseller from Sacramento, CA. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, her work has been published by Socrates on the Beach and The White Review. Burnside is her first novel. Avigayl Sharp is a writer from Chicago. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2023-2024 writing fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. Offseason is her first novel.