For Storyhouse Bookpub store owner Abigail Paxton, her upcoming “afterparty” is the main event.
“We’ll start the evening in the bookstore with a more casual start to everything with getting everyone a drink and some dessert and some time to kind of mingle among the shelves and give the authors some time to interface a little bit with readers,” said Paxton of the upcoming event. “I really like that because it makes the whole thing feel like what I really care about, which is people coming together.”
On Nov. 4, Des Moines’ Storyhouse Bookpub (505 Grand Ave, Suite 102) will be welcoming Iowa authors Jamel Brinkley (Witness), Louisa Hall (Reproduction) and Joe Milan Jr. (The All-American) to its storefront to read and mingle with attendees. The plan is to have half-an-hour of mingling before the authors are each given 30 minutes for a “mini-reading and discussion of their book.” That will then dovetail into discussion with one another followed by group questions and signings.
The event has come together largely as a result of Paxton wanting to create an event acknowledging the rich culture of fiction writing in Iowa.
“I really like being proactive about our author events instead of reactive, because we’re such a small bookstore that we cannot do everything,” she said. “These three authors I noticed as I was going through the list of upcoming books from all of the publishers we go through every season. These were three really excellent, credentialed fiction writers from right around us in Iowa. None of them live in Des Moines, but they live close enough that we should be celebrating them as master fiction writers.”
Brinkley and Hall both teach at the University of Iowa while Milan teaches creative writing at Waldorf University in Forest City. All three have released fiction books over the course of 2023.
For Milan, that release was The All-American, a novel that follows 17-year-old Bucky Yi, who has inherited very little of his family’s Korean heritage as he knows nothing of South Korea or even how to pronounce his Korean name.
Hall’s 2023 novel, Reproduction, shows readers the life of a novelist trying to write about Mary Shelley and, over the course of the narrative, compares and contrasts Shelley’s themes in Frankenstein with motherhood and the act of childbirth.
Brinkley’s first book, A Lucky Man, landed him a finalist spot in the 2018 National Book Awards. His latest release, Witness, is a collection of 10 short stories exploring characters in contemporary New York City and facing moral challenges.
“All three authors really have vibrant characters and, on a sentence-to-sentence level, have a craft to their work,” said Paxton. “They all have a very different tone … but I think they can really relate to each other in the kind of craft that they’re putting in.”
Tickets for the event are $8 per person, which covers the cost of drinks and food. Pie from local business Pie Bird Pies will be served. More information can be found at storyhousebookpub.com.
