Please join us at the store or via Zoom to celebrate the Austin launch of Thomas McNeely’s Pictures of the Shark. With special guests Nan Cuba and Elizabeth Harris.

“Pictures of the Shark is a profound meditation on the limits of familial love and the uncontrollable forces that shape a man’s heart. In these gorgeously crafted interlinked stories, Thomas McNeely demonstrates once again an uncanny ability to illuminate the darkest emotional corners of his characters with a vision that is as tender and compassionate as it is unflinching.” —Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of Barefoot Dogs

“This extraordinarily powerful novel-in-stories takes Philip Larkin’s famous dictum—’They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do’—and brings it to harrowing life. In prose as clear and flawless as the Texas sky, McNeely paints an indelible portrait of emotional harm, following Buddy’s journey from an innocent boy trapped in the fallout of a toxic marriage, to an alcoholic artist-in-love, to a damaged man who finds he will ‘always be his father’s son.’ The story ‘Tickle Torture,’ alone, is worth the price of this book. McNeely is one of the least gimmicky, most emotionally insightful writers around, and Pictures of the Shark sneaks up on you, stealthily, to devastating effect.” —Eric Puchner, author of Last Day on Earth and Model Home

Thomas H. McNeely’s first novel, Ghost Horse, won the Gival Press Novel Award. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Texas Monthly, Ploughshares, and many other magazines and anthologies. He has received Dobie Paisano, National Endowment for the Arts, and Wallace Stegner fellowships for his fiction. He currently teaches at Emerson College, Boston, and the Stanford Online Writing Studio.

Nan Cuba is the author of Body and Bread, winner of the PEN Southwest Award and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award and listed as one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine. Journalistic pieces were published in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine, and she appeared in documentaries by Netflix and Hulu. She is included in Texas Monthly’s “Ten to Watch (and Read),” has received a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, and is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center.

Elizabeth Harris’ novel-in-progress dramatizes an archivist’s discovery that her family’s boasted ancestor is a whitewashed antislavery politician, journalist, and activist. Her prize-winning Mayhem: Three Lives of a Woman (Gival Press, 2015) is a “Me Too” short novel set in 1936. Her collection of stories The Ant Generator (Iowa, 1991) won the John Simmons Prize.

Zoom details:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84115401072?pwd=bDVjbVJ1cXlPcUlhK3RDM2ROUVFFQT09

Meeting ID: 841 1540 1072
Passcode: 234826