Arvin Ahmadi is back! We loved hosting him for the launch of Girl Gone Viral, and are excited to celebrate How It All Blew Up, which has been described as "Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda goes to Italy"

Join us on Zoom Here!

(Photo credit: Joe Power)

"Arvin Ahmadi has written a novel that is authentic, hilarious, and heart-wrenching all at once. A unique point of view combined with riveting storytelling, How It All Blew Up will grab you from the first page and won't let go."--Angie Thomas, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Hate U Give and On the Come Up

About How It All Blew Up: Eighteen-year-old Amir Azadi always knew coming out to his Muslim family would be messy--he just didn't think it would end in an airport interrogation room. But when faced with a failed relationship, bullies, and blackmail, running away to Rome is his only option. Right?

Soon, late nights with new friends and dates in the Sistine Chapel start to feel like second nature... until his old life comes knocking on his door. Now, Amir has to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth to a US Customs officer, or risk losing his hard-won freedom.

About Arvin Ahmadi: Arvin Ahmadi grew up outside Washington, DC. He graduated from Columbia University and has worked in the tech industry. When he's not reading or writing books, he can be found watching late-night talk show interviews and editing Wikipedia pages. Down and Across is his first novel, followed by Girl Gone Viral.

Join us for the launch of Rachel Swearingen's debut story collection How to Walk on Water! Swearingen will be joined by Kate Wisel, author of Driving in Cars with Homeless Men!

Join us
on Zoom Here!

Join us on Zoom here!

About How to Walk on Water: In this spellbinding debut story collection, characters willingly open their doors to trouble. An investment banker falls for a self-made artist who turns the rooms of her apartment into eerie art installations. An au pair imagines her mundane life as film noir, endangering the infant in her care. A son pieces together the brutal attack his mother survived when he was a baby. These stories bristle with menace and charm with intimate revelations. Through nimble prose and considerable powers of observation, Swearingen takes us from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Northern Michigan, to Seattle, Venice, and elsewhere. She explores not only what it means to survive in a world marked by violence and uncertainty, but also how to celebrate what is most alive.

About Rachel Swearingen: Rachel Swearingen’s stories and essays have appeared in VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and others. Her debut story collection, How to Walk on Water was the winner of the 2018 New American Fiction Prize. She is the recipient of the 2015 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in Fiction, a 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the 2011 Mississippi Review Prize in Fiction. In 2019, she was named one of “30 Writers to Watch” by the Guild Literary Complex. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a PhD from Western Michigan University. She currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.

About Driving in Cars with Homeless Men: Driving in Cars with Homeless Men is a love letter to women moving through violence. These linked stories are set in the streets and the bards, the old homes, the tiny apartments, and the landscape of working-class Boston.

Serena, Frankie, Raffa and Nat collide and break apart like pool balls to come back together in an imagined post-divorce future. Through the gritty, unraveling truths of their lives, they find themselves in the bed of an overdosed lover, through the panting tongue of a rescue dog who is equally as dislanguaged as his owner, in the studio department of a compulsive liar, sitting backward but going forward in the galley of an airplane, in relationships that are at once playgrounds and cages.

About Kate Wisel: Kate Wisel is the author of Driving in Cars With Homeless Men, winner of the 2019 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, selected by Min Jin Lee. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in publications that include Gulf Coast, Tin House online, Los Angeles Review, New Ohio Review, The Best Small Fictions 2019, Norton Anthology: Flash Fiction America, Redivider (as winner of the Beacon Street Prize), and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the “Poetry on the T” prize and the Marcia Keach Prize. She was a Carol Houck fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and awarded scholarships at The Wesleyan Writer’s Conference, the Squaw Valley Writer’s Workshop, the Juniper Institute, Writing x Writer’s at Tomales Bay and Methow Valley and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago where she teaches at Columbia College Chicago and Loyola University.