About this Event
Please join us in store on June 5th at 7:00pm central for a special evening celebrating Lydi Connklin's new novel, Songs of No Provenance. Lydi will be in conversation with Jessamine Chan and JP Soleheim will be performing acompanying music!
About Songs of No Provenance:
Longlisted for Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize.
A suspenseful, wildly engaging debut novel by the award-winning author of Rainbow Rainbow, following a musician spiraling in self-doubt and self-searching after a night—and a relationship—gone wrong.
Songs of No Provenance tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. Joan seeks refuge at a writing camp for teenagers in rural Virginia, where she's forced to question her own toxic relationship to artmaking—and her complicated history with a friend and mentee—while finding new hope in her students and a deepening intimacy with a nonbinary artist and fellow camp staff member.
A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.
About the authors:
Lydi Conklin has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Fulbright, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and are a Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Jessamine Chan is the author of The School for Good Mothers, which was a New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna/TODAY Show Book Club pick, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, longlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Carnegie Medal, and one of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022. Translations in twenty languages have been published or are forthcoming. She lives in Chicago with her family.
JP Solheim is a fiction writer, literary critic, and musician. Their bands include The Smoothies (Southern Records) and Minim (Tour de Vis).
About the event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free! Lydi and Jessamine will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online with national shipping.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
