Name: In-Store: Sarah Minor: Carousel w/ Jordan Kisner
Start: 2026-07-23T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-07-23T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Books Are Magic Montague

$In-Store: Sarah Minor: Carousel w\/ Jordan Kisner$

“Minor's prose...as mesmerizing as the horizon rushing away from us in her rear-view mirror.”—Barbara Browning, author of The Miniaturists
About this Event

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/db8UTc9e8MQ
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 [email protected].

From an award-winning writer, a critical reflection on the human desire to see and be seen.

Carousel opens as a professor begins delivering a lecture to a hot room. Her students have the internet in their pockets, screens on their wrists, seeing in more directions than students ever could before. But what, in fact, are they looking at?

In the spirit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, Sarah Minor’s Carousel explores how the pursuit of panoramic vision frames power, distorts reality, and implicates both viewer and subject. Across short, loping sections that weave history with memoir, close looking with confession, Minor masterfully fuses the slide lecture with the lyric essay, tying medieval tapestries to surrealism and Instagram reels to predator drones. In language that captures the disorientation of that other carousel, the whirling carnival ride, Minor shows how the more we strive to see, the more we ultimately reveal ourselves.

Sarah Minor is the author of two previous books, Bright Archive and Slim Confessions: The Universe as a Spider or Spit, as well as the chapbook The Persistence of the Bonyleg: Annotated. Minor teaches writing at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City.

Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection Thin Places, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York and in Maine, where she teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College.