Join us in welcoming Andrew Bertaina as he discusses his collection One Person Away From You with author Andrew Gretes.
About One Person Away From You :
One Person Away From You is a collection of stories that oscillates between the fantastic and the familiar: for every woman who turns into a swan, there’s a man who bungles a romantic relationship in Italy; for every sky that rains a torrent of laughter, there’s a husband reminiscing about his honeymoon. Above all, the stories explore our common lot of lostness and longing, our question of whether our life and loves are the right ones or the product of some cosmic error. Whether it’s a sea appearing suddenly in a bone dry valley, an angel musing on his relationship with a mortal woman, or a narrator yearning for an absent lover the deeply emotional stories search for meaning. Throughout this collection, characters and entire towns search through the constructs of identity, time, fairy tales, and love letters, to find the flicker of constancy in the sea of change that is human life.
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Andrew Bertaina's short story collection One Person Away From You (2021) won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, The Normal School, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. He currently works as a Lecturer at Howard University.
Andrew Gretes is the author of How to Dispose of Dead Elephants (Sandstone Press, 2014), a novel which explores epilepsy through fables. His writing has appeared in The New England Review, Willow Springs, The Sycamore Review, and other journals. His research interests include speculative fiction, the history of humor, existentialism, phenomenology, and the rhetoric of self-help and the good life.
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This event will be hosted in-person at Lost City Books! Masks will be required of attendees.
Accessibility note: This event will be held up two fight of stairs. Lost City Books does not have an elevator. This event will be simultaneously live streamed on our YouTube page!
One Person Away From You will be available at Lost City Books!