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Event
Ruth Galm in conversation with Nicole Hughes: Into the Valley
Sponsored by Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler's
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
7:30pm
Kepler's Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
If you're a fan of early Joan Didion, you must read Ruth's debut novel, Into the Valley. Just like Didion, Galm is an astute cultural observer (especially of the American West), and she writes sparse prose packed with vivid details and eerie intimacies. The prose is hypnotic, the story emotional and sometimes disturbing. Come help us celebrate the first book by this incredibly talented local writer.
Into the Valley opens on the day in July 1967 when B. decides to pass her first counterfeit check and flee San Francisco for the Central Valley. B. is caught between generations. She's unmarried at 30 and doesn't understand the new counterculture youths, but she never fit into her mother's world either.
B. is beset by a disintegrative anxiety she calls "the carsickness." The only relief comes in handling the illicit checks and endless driving in the valley. As she travels the bare, anonymous landscape, meeting an array of other characters - an alcoholic professor, a bohemian teenage girl, a criminal admirer - B.'s flight becomes that of a woman unraveling, a person lost between who she is and who she cannot yet be.
"Like Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays, Into the Valley creates and recreates a wasted American landscape, and pulls us into a world whose emptiness has profound moral and social implications." Mary Gordon
Ruth Galm was born and raised in San Jose, California, earned an MFA from Columbia University, and has been in San Francisco ever since. Her short fiction is forthcoming from Indiana Review and has appeared on Joyland, a hub for short fiction.
Nicole Hughes earned an MFA in fiction from San José State University and lives in San Francisco. She is an Event Manager for Peninsula Arts & Letters, the non-profit partner of Kepler's Books, and a writer. She has been published in Liebamour and recently interviewed Vendela Vida on stage.
The event is free - please register today.
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LocationKepler's Books (View)
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: Yes! |
| Dog Friendly: Yes! |
| Non-Smoking: Yes! |
| Wheelchair Accessible: Yes! |
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