CANCELLED: Author Event - "Glaciers" by Alexis Smith

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CANCELLED: Author Event - "Glaciers" by Alexis Smith

Start: 02/11/2012 7:00 pm

2/9/11 - The author just cancelled this event.

Griffin Bay Bookstore and the San Juan Island Library are proud to present Portland author Alexis Smith and her debut novel, Glaciers, on Saturday, February 11, 7:00 pm at Griffin Bay Bookstore.

Glaciers is receiving wide acclaim with rave reviews in Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and in ELLE. Glaciers is the Indie Next pick for January 2012.

In Glaciers small moments of a single day illuminate the life of Isabel, a modern girl living in Portland, Oregon. A single, twenty something romantic, Isabel is attracted to found objects. She collects remnants, combs the racks for vintage gems, mends old books in the basement of her local library, and falls hard for unrequited (at least at first) love with a soldier home from Iraq. Isabel finds comfort in the past, but worries about the future—about urban decay and the effect of climate change on the Alaskan glaciers she knew in her youth. Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel’s sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life.

While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates, Isabel accumulates the stories of those around her and learns to tell her own. In graceful, poetic prose, Smith brings Isabel to life, and with her, the lives of a generation.

RAVE REVIEWS

Here is what a fellow bookseller said about Glaciers: "This lovely, contemplative novel packs a bigger emotional punch than its size suggests. As with the title metaphor, so much resides under the surface of who we are in public, what we say, and what we do. Honest, bittersweet reflection makes Glaciers the perfect reading to start the new year." -Ariana Paliobagis, Country Bookshelf, Bozeman, MT

“An Alaska childhood and dreams of faraway cities such as Amsterdam inform Alexis M. Smith’s Glaciers (Tin House), a delicate debut novel set in Portland, Oregon—“a slick fog of a city…drenched in itself”—that reveals in short, memory-soaked postcards of prose a day in the life of twenty something library worker Isabel.” —Lisa Shea, ELLE Magazine

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexis Smith received an MFA in creative writing from Goddard College. She has written for Tarpaulin Sky and powells.com. She lives in Portland, Oregon.