LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos Bookstore presents author Antonya Nelson,  who signs and discusses Nothing Right: Short Stories, Tuesday, February 10, at 6pm.

Set in the American Southwest, and featuring one previously unpublished story, Nothing Right shows one of our best writers working at the top of her game. Antonya Nelson’s stories are masterpieces: poignant, hilarious, truthful explorations of domesticity.

The artfully rendered characters in Nothing Right try to keep themselves intact as their personal lives explode around them. A mother and her teenage son finally find common ground when his girlfriend becomes pregnant. A woman leaves her husband and finds herself living with a stranger who is getting extensive plastic surgery while her best friend is dying of cancer.

In “Or Else,” one of three short stories nominated for a National Magazine Award for the New Yorker, a man brings his girlfriend to a house he claims belongs to his family, only to have his lie exposed when one of the real owners comes home to scatter her father’s ashes.

These stories are sure to delight longtime fans and readers lucky enough to be just discovering Antonya Nelson. Help Brazos celebrate this Houston treasure.

Antonya Nelson was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1961. She attended the University of Kansas and the University of Arizona, where she received an MFA in 1986. She is the author of four short story collections: Female Trouble [2002], Family Terrorists [1994], In the Land of Men [1992], and The Expendables [1990].

She is also the author of three novels: Living to Tell [2000], Nobody’s Girl [1998] and Talking in Bed [1996].

Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook and other magazines, as wells as in anthologies such as Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. The Expendables won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990 and Talking in Bed received the 1996 Heartland Award in fiction. Her books have been New York Times notable books in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she recently was named by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.”

Antonya Nelson is consistently praised for the beauty of her writing and for her exploration of the emotional terrain of women. In a recent review, The Washington Post Book World caller her “a formidable writer. That is, she’s a woman of piercing intelligence, a first-rate stylist, an explorer of language who questions all its customary uses while fashioning evocative descriptions and incisive phrases.”

She is the recipient of an National Endowment for the Arts grant and 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. She divides her time between Telluride, Colorado, and Houston Texas, where she shares, with her husband novelist Robert Boswell, the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.