Author Event: Jedediah Berry and Ryan Habermeyer

Join us in the ReRead bookstore on Sunday, May 17 at 2 pm for an afternoon of reading and conversation with award-winning authors Jedediah Berry and Ryan Habermeyer. Listen to them share their latest work and discuss what drives their writing, followed by a Q&A and book signing!

About Ryan Habermeyer:

Ryan Habermeyer is a native of Los Angeles. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. He is the author of the forthcoming novel Necronauts (Stillhouse Press) and the short story collections Salt Folk (Cornerstone Press) and The Science of Lost Futures (BOA Editions). His award-winning stories and essays have been published in such literary journals as Conjunctions, Alaska Quarterly Review, Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, Cincinnati Review, Puerto del Sol, Flyway, Fairy Tale Review, DIAGRAM, Blackbird, and Cimarron Review. A Fulbright Scholar who has lived, taught and studied in Poland, Scotland, Spain, and Mexico, he is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Salisbury University.

Book: Necronauts

Calypsee, Utah: a small fundamentalist town at the edge of nowhere whose patron saint is Ronald Reagan and whose motto is In Armageddon We Trust. Among its misfits, perverts, and prophets lives a boy wearing a cosmonaut helmet—or maybe it’s just an old fishbowl—who wants more than anything to launch himself into outer space.
Written in the form of ninety-five newspaper obituaries and interspersed with vernacular photography, Necronauts is a loosely reimagined Pinocchio tale and ode to campy old sci-fi films. By turns philosophical and whimsical, savage and sentimental, Ryan Habermeyer’s funhouse ride through the American West is also an intimate portrait of fathers and sons and a searing satire of 1980s Americana—where addictive religious paranoia and suspect science blur into a quixotic fever dream full of reckless fantasy.

About Jedediah Berry:

Jedediah Berry’s latest novel, The Naming Song, won the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction and was an LA Times Book Prize finalist. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. He is the author of numerous stories and interactive works, including The Family Arcana, which was a finalist for a World Fantasy Award. He is the co-creator, with Andrew McAlpine, of the Wildendrem adventure game setting, which began with the Ennie Award-winning The Valley of Flowers. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Book: The Naming Song

When the words went away, the world changed. All meaning was lost, and every border fell. Monsters slipped from dreams to haunt the waking while ghosts wandered the land in futile reveries. Only with the rise of the committees of the named—Maps, Ghosts, Dreams, and Names—could the people stand against the terrors of the nameless wilds. They built borders around their world and within their minds, shackled ghosts and hunted monsters, and went to war against the unknown.
For one unnamed courier of the Names Committee, the task of delivering new words preserves her place in a world that fears her. But after a series of monstrous attacks on the named, she is forced to flee her committee and seek her long-lost sister. Accompanied by a patchwork ghost, a fretful monster, and a nameless animal who prowls the shadows, her search for the truth of her past opens the door to a revolutionary future—for the words she carries will reshape the world.
The Naming Song is a book of deep secrets and marvelous discoveries, strange adventures and dangerous truths. It’s the story of a world locked in a battle over meaning. Most of all, it’s the perfect fantasy for anyone who’s ever dreamed of a stranger, freer, more magical world.