Chinelo Okparanta and Tope Folarin for HARRY SYLVESTER BIRD *IN-PERSON*
Join Loyalty Bookstores and Montgomery County Public Library for an in-person event with Chinelo Okparanta and Tope Folarin for the recent release of Harry Sylvester Bird! This event will take place in the third floor meeting room at the Brigadier General Charles E. McGee (Silver Spring) Library in downtown Silver Spring. **This event is free to attend, but please RSVP below to let us know you're coming! You can purchase the book from Loyalty below or borrow a copy from MCPL, and we will have additional copies for sale at the event. Please email events@loyaltybookstores.com with any questions.
ABOUT THE BOOK
"Disarmingly funny." - The New York Times
From the award-winning author of Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water comes a brilliant, provocative, up-to-the-minute satirical novel about a young white man’s education and miseducation in contemporary America.
Harry Sylvester Bird grows up in Edward, Pennsylvania, with his parents, Wayne and Chevy, whom he greatly dislikes. They’re racist, xenophobic, financially incompetent, and they have quite a few secrets of their own. To Harry, they represent everything wrong with this country. And his small town isn’t any better. He witnesses racial profiling, graffitied swastikas, and White Power signs on his walk home from school. He can’t wait until he’s old enough to leave. When he finally is, he moves straight to New York City, where he feels he can finally live out his true inner self.
In the city, he meets and falls in love with Maryam, a young Nigerian woman. But when Maryam begins to pull away, Harry is forced to confront his identity as he never has before—if he can.
Brilliant, funny, original, and unflinching, Harry Sylvester Bird is a satire that speaks to all the most pressing tensions and anxieties of our time—and of the history that has shaped us and might continue to do so.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chinelo Okparanta is the award-winning author of two previous books, Under the Udala Trees and Happiness, Like Water, and she has been listed for nearly every early-career prize out there, from the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize to NYPL Young Lions Award, Kirkus Prize, and more, and is the winner of the Lambda Literary Award and named a Granta Best Young American Novelist. Okparanta directs the creative writing program at Swarthmore College where she is Associate Professor of English.
ABOUT THE IN CONVERSATION PARTNER
Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He has garnered many awards for his writing, including the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.
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