It's Local Author Night at The Book Cellar featuring Julie Hyzy (Virtual Sabotage), Jim Doherty (An Obscure Grave), Beth Ann Fennelly (Heating & Cooling), Francie Arenson (Chuckerman Makes a Movie), and Monica Berlin (Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live).

About Julie Hyzy:

Julie Hyzy is a New York Times bestselling author who has won the Anthony, Barry, and Derringer awards. She writes the White House Chef Mystery series and Manor House series. In 2017 she began writing a new thriller stand-alone, which is a return to her beginnings, when she wrote darker mysteries and thrillers as well as short stories with a futuristic twist. Virtual Sabotage launches in October, 2018. Julie and her husband Curt live in Chicago’s Southwest suburbs.

About Virtual Sabotage:

Virtual Sabotage introduces Kenna Ward, an envoy for a virtual reality company whose implants create a thrilling world that allows people to create daring scenarios in a safe environment. Most of the time, that is. When in the rare instance the human brain mistakes the terrifying event as real, it's up to Ward to enter the scenario and pull them back to reality. But when a key envoy goes rogue and people begin responding in odd and dangerous ways, Ward delves deeper, finding a sinister conspiracy to take over not only the virtual reality world, but the real one as well. Ward must stop it before there are no longer any independent minds left to control.

About Jim Doherty:

A cop for more than 20 years, Jim has served American law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels, policing everything in Chicago, from inner city streets to rural dirt roads, from college campuses to military bases, from suburban parks to urban railroad yards. His first book, Just the Facts - True Tales of Cops and Criminals, was a finalist for the Macavity Award in the non-fiction category. An Obscure Grave is his first novel. 

About An Obscure Grave:

A beautiful victim. An elusive criminal. A part time policeman. Three pieces of the mystery. Dan Sullivan, UC Berkeley undergrad and part-time cop, is working the tip-line for a missing-persons case that is getting national attention. DeeDee Merryweather, beautiful Cal co-ed, has disappeared. The prevailing theory is that she's been abducted. But one of the tipsters, an anonymous caller claiming psychic powers, believes it's a murder, because, she says, she's sensed DeeDee's corpse buried in a makeshift tomb. If she's right, the Berkeley Police and the FBI are on the wrong track. But will a part-time reservist be able to put them on the right one that leads to DeeDee's obscure grave? And, from there, to her killer?

About Beth Ann Fennelly:

Beth Ann Fennelly was born and raised in Lake Forest, Illinois, and is now Poet Laureate of Mississippi and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. A contributing editor to The Oxford American, she also writes freelance on travel, culture, and design for many magazines. Beth Ann lives with her husband and their three children, Anna Claire, Thomas, and Nolan, in Oxford, Mississippi.

About Heating & Cooling:

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys. Some pieces are wistful, some wry, and many reveal the humor buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments, and awakens us to these moments as they appear in the margins of our lives.

About Francie Arenson:

Francie Arenson Dickman has been using her family as the source of writing material her whole life. Her personal essays have appeared in publications such as The Chicago Tribune, Huffington Post, Today Parents, Motherwell Magazine, Brain Child Magazine, among others. She lives in the same suburb of Chicago in which she grew up, with her husband, twin daughters and dog, Pickles. She received her B.A. from the University of Michigan and her J.D. from The George Washington University School of Law.

About Chuckerman Makes a Movie:

“Love matters a little, but luck matters more.” October 9, 2018---The words of thirty-five-year-old David Melman's Jewish grandmother still haunt him. He's scared to settle down. Instead, he dates twenty-something pop stars that he meets through his celebrity-branding business. But when his niece and nephew inform him that he's hit "rock bottom" with his latest inappropriate relationship, David realizes that change might be in order. So, when his sister Marcy, with her own ulterior motive, pushes him to take a film-writing class taught by her friend Laurel, he agrees. Will writing a movie about a childhood visit to his grandparents in Florida, an unforgettable driving lesson, and a 1977 Cadillac bring David love? Luck? Or both? Alternating between David's present-day life and his past through his movie script, Chuckerman Makes a Movie is a romantic comedy blended with a comedic coming-of-age.

About Monica Berlin:

Monica is the author of Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live, winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open (fall 2018), No Shape Bends the River So Long, a collaboration with Beth Marzoni (Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions, 2015), and two chapbooks, From Maybe To Region and Your Small Towns of Adult Sorrow & Melancholy. A native of Chicago, Berlin is a professor of English, long-time associate director of the Program in Creative Writing, and chair of English at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois.

About Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live:

Nostalgia for a World Where We Can Live resides at the turbulent confluence of relentless news cycles and the repeated rending of our interior lives. These poems notice the day in the wind, the night tucked up to the train tracks, and a slipping-in of yesterday, memory-laden, alongside the promise of a more hopeful tomorrow. Here is the Midwest, vibrant and relic, in the ongoing years of collapse and recovery. Here the constant companionship of weather lays claim to its own field of vision. Here, too, devastation: what’s left after. Berlin reminds us we are at the mercy of rivers, oceans, earth, wind, rain, blizzard, drought, and each other. “Maybe what I mean / to say is that I’ve come to see all the names we might / recognize destruction by,” Berlin’s speaker discovers. “We might / sometimes, stupidly, call it love.”

Join us at The Book Cellar to celebrate Simon Smith and his debut novel, Son of Soothsayer (New Meridian Arts).

About Son of Soothsayer: 

This provocative satirical novel dares to question the prevailing notion that the cure-all for society's ills is a heavy dose of positive thinking. Written as a chapter-by-chapter response to the self-help manual The Secret, Son of Soothsayer is both a sprawling family saga and critical look at the trappings of new age philosophy. The book traces the coming-of-age of narrator Clayton Blaine, who lives in the shadow of a mother so steeped in the cult of positive thinking that she thinks she can alter the universe by the sheer force of concentration. Through a series of sometimes comic, sometimes poignant snapshots of Clayton's adolescence, readers will be captivated by the family's ruinous attempts at enlightenment and moved by their resolve to mine truth from the rubble, no matter the cost.

 -  " Funny, touching, insightful, and ultimately wise, Simon A. Smith’s Son of Soothsayer is a novel that delights." - Terrell Isselhard, Windy City Review.

 -  " Delightfully reminiscent of Cruddy by Lynda Barry, Smith's gift for colorful description and propulsive storytelling is intoxicating." Ben Tanzer, author of Be Cool and SEX AND DEATH

 -  "The danger of blind optimism is often underestimated, but in this book, the threat is tangible and urgent. Smith does an impressive job building the menacing facets, creating suspense while also allowing readers the relief of laughing at the characters' pratfalls along the way. A perfect book for this moment, when it feels impossible to ignore the shifting dynamics of politics and community. Here is a new lens to peer through in search of that elevated empathy and understanding". - Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It and My Only Wife

About Simon Smith: 

A Chicago novelist, teacher and script writer, Simon holds a BA in fiction writing and a MAT in secondary education. His fiction has appeared in many journals, including Hobart Pulp, Whiskey Island, Juked and Curbside Splendor. His journalism has also aired on Chicago Public Radio and appeared in the Chicago Reader. He lives in the Albany Park neighborhood with his wife and son.