In-Person: Richard Butner presents THE ADVENTURISTS, with Nathan Ballingrud

Tuesday, May 17, 2022 - Signing Line at 5:30 pm, Talk begins at 6:00 pm

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Flyleaf will offer seating for up to 50 in-person guests, with priority access given to folks who purchase the book. Masks recommended.

"Flawless. . . . Readers of John Crowley, Ray Bradbury, and Sally Rooney alike will find a home."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Remember the girl you once knew, the theater kid? Now she’s become the Queen, and you might need to rescue her. There’s the historic house, where someone once saw a ghost and you almost fell in love. An ornithopter hangs in the lobby of your corporate workplace: your co-worker thinks he might be able to operate it. Once you found a tunnel under your old high school, and couldn’t resist going to see where it led.

Sometimes a door will open into a new world, sometimes into the past. Putting on a costume might be the restart you are half hoping for. There are things buried here. You might want to save them. You might want to get out of the way.

Butner’s allusive and elusive stories reach into the uncanny corners of life—where there are no job losses, just HCAPs (Head Count Allocation Procedures), where a tree might talk to just one person, where Death’s Fool is not to be ignored.

Richard Butner's short fiction has appeared in Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, been shortlisted for the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Fountain Award, and been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award. He has written for and performed with the Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, Aggregate Theatre, Bare Theatre, the Nickel Shakespeare Girls, and Urban Garden Performing Arts. His nonfiction, on topics ranging from computers to cocktails to architecture, has appeared in IBM Think Research, Wired, PC Magazine, The News & Observer, Teacher, The Independent Weekly, The North Carolina Review of Books, Triangle Alternative, and Southern Lifestyle. He lives in North Carolina, where he runs the annual Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference. His website is richardbutner.com. He and Harry Houdini have used the same trapdoor.

**Headshot credits to Areon Mobasher

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts in 1970 but has spent most of his life in the South. He’s worked as a bartender in New Orleans and a cook on offshore oil rigs. His stories have appeared in several Year’s Best anthologies, and he has twice won the Shirley Jackson Award. His collection North American Lake Monsters was the basis for the Hulu series Monsterland and his second collection, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell includes the novella “The Visible Filth” which was filmed by Babak Anvari as Wounds. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with his daughter.

Event date:

Tuesday, May 17, 2022 - 5:30pm

Event address:

752 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Chapel Hill, NC 27514