And So It Begins
Jonathan Escoffery, Kate Folk, and Caroline Frost all come to the festival with critically acclaimed, bestselling debut books. How did they do it? Where did they begin? Today, they will discuss their own journeys and the books that brought them to Tucson.
| Where: | Student Union Kachina (Seats 100)  |
| When: | Sun, Mar 5, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing Area - UA BookStore Tent (on Mall) (following presentation)
|
| Genre: | Fiction / Literature |
| Moderator: | Jenny Carrillo |
Panelists
Jonathan EscofferyJonathan Escoffery is the author of the linked story collection, "If I Survive You," a New York Times Editor's Choice, an IndieNext Pick, and a National Bestseller. "If I Survive You" has been long-listed for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and is a finalist for the Southern Book Prize and the California Bookseller Alliance’s Golden Poppy Award....
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Kate FolkKate Folk is the author of "Out There," a story collection. She has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, One Story, Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern and Zyzzyva....
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Caroline FrostCaroline Frost is the author of "Shadows of Pecan Hollow," which won the 2022 Crook's Corner Book Prize for best first novel. A native of Texas, she earned a graduate degree at the University of Southern California and now is a licensed marriage and family therapist who lives with her husband and three children in Los Angeles....
Books:
If I Survive You
Jonathan Escoffery
Fiction / Literature
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
September 2022
ISBN 9780374605988
272 pages
"If I Survive You is a collection of connected short stories that reads like a novel, that reads like real life, that reads like fiction written at the highest level.
This is where Jonathan Escoffrey's career begins. There are no limits to where he will go." —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
"Kaleidoscopic, urgent, hilarious, revelatory and like nothing you've read before." —Marlon James, author of Moon Witch, Spider King
A major debut, blazing with style and heart, that follows a Jamaican family striving for more in Miami, and introduces a generational storyteller.
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. The family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”
Masterfully constructed with heart and humor, the linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You centers on Trelawny as he struggles to carve out a place for himself. After a fight with Topper—himself reckoning with his failures as a parent and his longing for Jamaica—Trelawny claws his way out of homelessness through a series of odd, often hilarious jobs. Meanwhile, his brother, Delano, attempts a disastrous cash grab, and his cousin, Cukie, looks for a father. As each character searches for a foothold, they never forget the profound danger of climbing without a safety net.
Pulsing with vibrant lyricism and inimitable style, sly commentary and contagious laughter, Escoffery’s debut unravels what it means to be in between homes and cultures in a world at the mercy of capitalism and whiteness. With If I Survive You, Escoffery announces himself as a prodigious storyteller in a class of his own, a chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful. More/less
Out There
Stories
Kate Folk
Fiction / Literature
Random House Publishing Group
December 2022
ISBN 9780593231487
272 pages
Shadows of Pecan Hollow
A Novel
Caroline Frost
Fiction / Literature
HarperCollins Publishers
February 2022
ISBN 9780063065345
416 pages
