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Kimbilio and Left Bank Books presents Angela Flournoy & Denne Michele NorrisKimbilio returns with two highly celebrated authors Angela Flournoy & Denne Michele Norris. Flournoy was a finalist for the National Book Award for The Turner House, a finalist for the 2025 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, and The Wilderness is a most anticipated book from numerous outlets. Norris is the editor in chief of Electric Literature and is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. Her debut novel When the Harvest Comes has received praise from across the literary world.
"The Wilderness arrives like a miracle. Here is the novel I'm always waiting for, one which captures and explains and deepens the world around me. These women, these friends -- in their grief and loss, their dedication and their communion -- are so achingly real it's hard to let them go. A book of ideas, gorgeously written with clear-sighted vision by one of the wisest, most talented authors working today. Angela Flournoy's The Wilderness is a book to get lost in." -- Justin Torres, author of Blackouts, winner of the National Book Award
"Epic, intimate, brutal, and tender . . . Denne Michele Norris has written a breathtaking testimony about the boundlessness of love. This is the arrival of a major new American voice." --Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Flournoy & Norris will personalize and sign copies after the presentation! Personalized and signed copies will be available to be mailed anywhere in the country. For personalized copies, please order before noon on November 6th.
Join us at Left Bank Books
399 N. Euclid Ave
St. Louis, MO 63108
Watch the livestream on Left Bank Books' YouTube Page
https://www.youtube.com/@LeftBankBooks/streams
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https://lbbfound.org/
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About the Speakers
Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York.
Denne Michele Norris is the editor in chief of Electric Literature, winner of the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. She is the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. She co-hosts the critically acclaimed podcast Food 4 Thot and holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
About The Wilderness
FINALIST FOR THE 2025 KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION
Named a most anticipated book by New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Vogue, The Boston Globe, New York Magazine, People Magazine, The Millions, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Literary Hub
"Wonderfully ambitious.... Flournoy explores the complexity of friendship, family, and home in a voice that is expansive yet intimate, humorous yet devastating. I loved this book." -- Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half and The Mothers
An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife--in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.
Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood--overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences--swoops in and stays.
Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January's got a relationship with a "good" man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.
As these friends move from the late 2000's into the late 2020's, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another--amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.
The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy's masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
399 N Euclid Ave, St. Louis, MO, United States, Missouri 63108, 391 N Euclid Ave, St Louis, MO 63108-1245, United States, Clayton
