HEIDI JULAVITS and NOAH HAWLEY read and sign their novels THE VANISHERS and THE GOOD FATHER

Start: 04/06/2012 7:30 pm

Heidi Julavits c Molly D Blake Noah Hawley

The Vanishers by Julavits; The Good Father by Hawley (both books published by Doubleday)

Acclaimed novelist and Believer editor Heidi Julavits (The Uses of Enchantment) returns to Skylight to read and sign her new novel, The Vanishers, with novelist and screenwriter Noah Hawley, reading and signing his new novel The Good Father.

Praise for The Uses of Enchantment:
"The Uses of Enchantment is an act of story-telling bravado, deadly smart, as shadowed with sex, violence, and deceit as the incident that it portrays. Dark and light, clever and profound, artful and effortless, the novel never stops feeling dangerous, both to the lies we tell ourselves about girls' erotic lives and to the easier truths, as well. Julavits is a wicked prose stylist, and this is her best book yet." --Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Beautifully wrought. . . . Assertively smart, trickily constructed." --The New York Times

Praise for The Good Father:
"The father of a man who assassinates a presidential candidate tries to make sense of his son's crime in Hawley's gripping new novel...With great skill, Hawley renders Dr. Allen's treacherous emotional geography, from his shock and guilt to his growing sense that he knows far less about his son than he thought...Hawley's complicated protagonist is a fully fathomed and beautifully realized character whose emotional growth never slows a narrative that races toward a satisfying and touching conclusion." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"The Good Father is hypnotic and haunting and I lost all track of time when I was reading it. Suddenly the day had become night and still I was engrossed in one father's poignant story and Noah Hawley's mesmeric tales of a long litany of assassins." --Chris Bohjalian, author of The Night Strangers, The Double Bind, and Secrets of Eden

Heidi Julavits is the author of three critically acclaimed novels, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She's a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan and Maine.

Noah Hawley is an author, screenwriter, and producer. He has published three previous novels, conceived and run two network television shows, and written one feature film. Before creating his own shows, he was a writer and producer for the hit show Bones on FOX. He currently splits his time between Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Photo of Julavits by Molly D. Blake. Photo of Hawley by Carolyn Fong.

The Vanishers: A Novel (Hardcover)

By Heidi Julavits

$26.95

ISBN-13: 9780385523813
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Doubleday, 3/2012

Other Editions of this Title

From the acclaimed novelist and The Believer editor HEIDI JULAVITS, a wildly imaginative and emotionally intense novel about mothers, daughters, and the psychic damage women can inflict on one another. Is the bond between mother and daughter unbreakable, even by death? Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment. Julia retreats to a faceless job in Manhattan. But others have noted Julia's emerging gifts, and soon she's recruited to track down an elusive missing person--a controversial artist who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew of her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others--including her own--goes far deeper than she ever imagined. As powerful and gripping as all of Julavits's acclaimed novels, The Vanishers is a stunning meditation on grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter's love.

The Good Father (Hardcover)

By Noah Hawley

$25.95

ISBN-13: 9780385535533
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Doubleday, 3/2012

Other Editions of this Title

An intense, psychological novel about one doctor's suspense-filled quest to unlock the mind of a suspected political assassin: his twenty-year old son. As the Chief of Rheumatology at Columbia Presbyterian, Dr. Paul Allen's specialty is diagnosing patients with conflicting symptoms, patients other doctors have given up on. He lives a contented life in Westport with his second wife and their twin sons--hard won after a failed marriage earlier in his career that produced a son named Daniel. In the harrowing opening scene of this provocative and affecting novel, Dr. Allen is home with his family when a televised news report announces that the Democratic candidate for president has been shot at a rally, and Daniel is caught on video as the assassin. Daniel Allen has always been a good kid--a decent student, popular--but, as a child of divorce, used to shuttling back and forth between parents, he is also something of a drifter. Which may be why, at the age of nineteen, he quietly drops out of Vassar and begins an aimless journey across the United States, during which he sheds his former skin and eventually even changes his name to Carter Allen Cash. Told alternately from the point of view of the guilt-ridden, determined father and his meandering, ruminative son, "The Good Father" is a powerfully emotional page-turner that keeps one guessing until the very end. This is an absorbing and honest novel about the responsibilities--and limitations--of being a parent and our capacity to provide our children with unconditional love in the face of an unthinkable situation.