PETALUMA --

Copperfield's Books welcomes local authors and friends Grant Faulkner and Gail Butensky to Petaluma in celebration of their new book - Something Out There in the Distance. 

They will be joined in conversation by Kara Vernor, author of Because I Wanted to Write You a Pop Song: Stories

Join us for a reading and warm discussion followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

This is a free event, registration recommended for seating.

Two lovers go on one final road trip through the American desert, hoping that they can outrun life itself.

Flash-fiction master Grant Faulkner and photographer Gail Butensky have partnered to create this unique narrative made up of stories alongside edge-of-the-world photography. The book tells of two lovers taking a reckless, searching road trip through the American West. Dawn is a photographer who captures desert landscapes. Jonny drives just to drive, running away from the end of time or running toward the end of time, looking for a home even as his restlessness overtakes him. By turns funny, poignant, and heartbreaking, Something Out There in the Distance is big in emotions while brief in words. An extraordinary collaboration between word and image, Dawn and Jonny’s journey transports us to a place, achingly familiar, populated by love, loss, and wonder.

Author:

Grant Faulkner is the cofounder of 100 Word Story, the cofounder of the Flash Fiction Institute, and the cohost of the podcast Memoir Nation. He is the author of several books, including The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story (UNM Press) and All the Comfort Sin Can Provide.

Gail Butensky is a renowned photographer whose work has been featured on numerous record covers as well as in books and magazines. She is the author of the photography book Every Bend.

Kara Vernor's fiction has appeared in Gigantic Sequins, PANK, No Tokens, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She has been a Best Small Fictions finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a Mendocino Coast Writers' Conference Estelle Frank Fellow. She is currently an Elizabeth George Foundation scholar at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, and she cohosts Get Lit, a quarterly reading series in San Francisco's North Bay. Learn more at karavernor.com.

Praise:

“‘You can’t take a bad photo of a highway’—my favorite quote from this beautiful little book about two lovers on the run from death. something out there in the distance reads like a song, and like a song it will echo inside you long after you’ve finished it.” — Molly Giles, author of Life Span: Impressions of a Lifetime Spent Crossing and Recrossing the Golden Gate Bridge

“The shape of this book is small but powerful, uncommon but familiar because it is about the unimaginable gap between breathing and dreaming that is grief. Grief literature is trending for a reason, because we are in a state of great loss and transformation. This work aims a bleary eye on the land, the sky, palm trees, and chlorinated pools and then into a single pair of bodies, restless, regretful, earnest, gorgeous, ashamed, and in love—then it waves good-bye to what will never be again.” — Venita Blackburn, author of Dead in Long Beach, California