Award-winning author Elizabeth Eslami will read from her new collection of short stories, Hibernate, on Thursday, April 17.
“In these globe-spanning stories, Elizabeth Eslami follows ordinary men and women who slowly awaken to hard choices. A fishing trip forces two Montana brothers to grow up in ways they never could have imagined. A Sudanese immigrant begins a new life with his girlfriend in America, only to find himself pulled toward his mother’s past transgressions. A group of tourists visits an Indian pueblo and realizes their tour guide isn’t at all who they expected. A shipwrecked captain and his men cling to the company of narwhals and Eskimos. And in the unforgettable title story, two lovers trade life as they’ve known it for an escape into the extraordinary.”
Hibernate earned Eslami the 2013 Ohio State University Prize for Short Fiction. Author Elise Blackwell praises Eslami’s work as “sage, vital and addictive,” while writer Karen Palmer compares the stories to a solar eclipse: “there is the same feeling of melancholy suspense, the expectation of something rare and beautiful, of being held both inside and outside of time.”
Eslami’s essays, short stories, and travel writing have appeared most recently in The Rumpus, The Literary Review and The Sun, and her work is featured in the anthologies Tremors: New Fiction By Iranian American Writers and Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema. She is a senior prose editor at Tupelo Quarterly and currently teaches in the MFA Program at Manhattanville College.
The reading will take place at 7 p.m. in Elk River Books’ new store, 120 N. Main St. (formerly Chatham Fine Art), and will be followed by a signing and reception.
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