We're excited to welcome Jonathan Blum to the store to read from his first short story collection The Usual Uncertainties!

"In these wonderfully various stories, gentle and bizarre and tragic and very funny, there are characters the likes of which have rarely been given life in fiction: The young son of a pulmonary oncologist learns excitedly to read x-rays, and that excitement is very different than what his father feels. A widow makes a business of bringing a quality of life to elders, and a thirteen-year-old Roger, on the occasion of his Bar Mitzvah, has a T-shirt stamped: I'd Rather Be Davening. Herm is a one-man ad hoc adoption agency finding unwanted newborns and delivering them into well-appointed futures. Jonathan Blum descends from a great tradition of Jewish storytellers, Richler, Malamud, Michaels, and he brings the tradition into the twenty-first century, and he brings the tradition west, too, to Los Angeles. Oh, and south to Florida, and right up to the Shabbat table where Adam sits with his Thai girlfriend in 'A Certain Light on Los Angeles.' There is a certain light here in these stories and it is very much worth your time."-Michelle Latiolais

About The Usual Uncertainties: Jonathan Blum's highly anticipated first collection is storytelling at its finest. In precise, elegant prose, these stories follow characters and communities often consigned to the edge of the frame: a community college dropout, a geriatric care manager, a square dance bar mitzvah, a Scrabble club, an entrepreneurial Thai immigrant, and a South Florida country club. With echoes of Leonard Michaels, Mavis Gallant, and Lore Segal, Blum explores the ways our divergent histories tether us together and at times push us completely apart. THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES: STORIES revels in the persistent human struggle to love with abandon and marks a dynamic voice in American short fiction.

About Jonathan Blum: Jonathan Blum is the author of two books of fiction: LAST WORD (Rescue Press, 2013), a novella, and THE USUAL UNCERTAINTIES: STORIES (Rescue Press, 2019), a story collection. Blum grew up in Miami and graduated from UCLA and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His short stories have appeared in Angels Flight-literary west, The Carolina Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, Playboy, Sonora Review, Shanxi Literature, among others. He has taught fiction writing at The University of Iowa, Drew University, and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and is the recipient of a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award, a Hawthornden fellowship in Scotland, and a grant from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. He has also been a guest writer at the Tianjin Binhai New Area International Writing Program in China. He lives in Los Angeles.

About Christian TeBordo: Christian TeBordo's latest book, Ghost Engine, won the Bridge Eight Fiction Prize and will be published this fall. He is the author of four previous books, including Toughlahoma, published by Rescue in 2015. He lives with his family in Chicago, where he is director of the MFA Program and assistant professor of English at Roosevelt University.