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Literary Sojourn

October 10, 2015. 11am-5pm

We are proud to be the Official Literary Sojourn Bookseller!

Literary Sojourn is an annual festival of authors and readers celebrating the power of the book. Each fall, an esteemed slate of authors and 500 book lovers from all over the country gather in Steamboat Springs, Colorado at the Sheraton Steamboat Resort. Together they revel in the written word, fueled by award-winning writers who share the stories and inspiration behind their exceptional books.

Why buy Literary Sojourn authors' books from Off the Beaten Path?

  • A portion of the proceeds from all sales of current Literary Sojourn authors’ books are donated to this non-profit event.
  • Book sales through the Literary Sojourn official bookseller are an important factor in a publisher’s decision to support an author’s participation at the Sojourn.
  • Your purchase from Off the Beaten Path ensures that Literary Sojourn will continue to thrive with the brilliant authors and compelling reads you’ve come to expect.

2015 Authors

Diane Ackerman

Poet, essayist and naturalist Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry. Her latest nonfiction book, The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, is a New York Times bestseller tapped as one the 100 Notable Books of 2014. It celebrates the natural world and human ingenuity, while exploring how the human race has become the single dominant force of change on the whole planet, and the many earth-shaking changes that now affect every part of our lives and those of our fellow creatures. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond raves of her “vivid writing, inexhaustible stock of insights, and unquenchable optimism…establishing her as a national treasure, and as one of our great authors.” Ackerman’s memoir, One Hundred Names for Love, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Circle Critics Award. The Zookeeper’s Wife, a true story of Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who manage to save over three hundred people from the Nazis during WWII, was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Orion Book Award. Ackerman's other works include: An Alchemy of Mind, a poetics of the brain based on the latest neuroscience; Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden; A Natural History of Love; and her bestseller, A Natural History of the Senses.

Diane's Books

Lily King

Lily King’s new novel, Euphoria, won the 2014 Kirkus Award and the New England Book Award and topped numerous summer reading lists including The Boston Globe, O Magazine and National Geographic.  The New York Times Book Review calls Euphoria “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace— a love triangle in extremis . . . The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic.” King’s novel Father of the Rain was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a Publishers Weekly Best Novel of the Year and winner of the 2010 New England Book Award and the Maine Fiction Award. The English Teacher won the Maine Fiction Award, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year and a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. Her debut novel, The Pleasing Hour, was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. King is also the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and Whiting Writer’s Award.

Lily King's Books

Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu is a recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation, a 20 Under 40 award from The New Yorker, and a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant. The Ethiopian-American novelist has penned three novels, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, How to Read the Air and All Our Names, each of which opens a window into the little-explored world of the African diaspora in America. His new book, All Our Names, tells a sweeping, continent-spanning story about the love between men and women, between friends and between citizens and their countries, and a transfixing exploration of the relationships that define us. NPR calls it “a subtle masterpiece.” The New York Times says, “While questions of race, ethnicity and point of origin do crop up repeatedly in Mengestu’s fiction, they are merely his raw materials, the fuel with which he so artfully — but never didactically — kindles disruptive, disturbing stories exploring the puzzles of identity, place and human connection.” Mengestu’s journalism and fiction have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal.

Dinaw Mengestu's Books

Mary Doria Russell

Mary Doria Russell’s bestselling novels have won nine national and international literary awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the James Tiptree Award, and the American Library Association Readers’ Choice Award. She is the author of Doc, The Sparrow, Children of God, A Thread of Grace, Dreamers of the Day and a richly detailed and meticulously researched new historical novel about Wyatt Earp, Epitaph. Epic and intimate, this novel gives voice to the real men and women whose lives were changed forever by those fatal thirty seconds at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone. In a starred review, Kirkus says, “Despite all that has been written and filmed about Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp, Russell’s pointedly anti-epic anti-romance is so epic and romantic that it whets the reader’s appetite for more.” A Thread of Grace was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Entertainment Weekly selected The Sparrow as one of the ten best books of the year, raving, “Important novels leave deep cracks in our beliefs, our prejudices, and our blinders. The Sparrow is one of them.” Doc is being made into an HBO series directed by Ron Howard. The Seattle Times the novel that inspires the series “intoxicating . . . Doc reads like a movie you can’t wait to watch.”

Mary Doria Russell’s Books

Richard Russo

Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, Richard Russo is the author of seven novels, a short story collection called The Whore's Child and Other Stories, the memoir Elsewhere, and numerous screenplays. When Russo wrote his first book, Mohawk, he was still a full-time college teacher working on his novels at a local diner between classes. After the success of Nobody's Fool (both the book and a movie starting Paul Newman), he gave up teaching to pursue his writing career. Known for his depiction of working class life in depressed Northeastern towns reminiscent of the burned-out mill town of Gloversville, N.Y. where he grew up, Russo has been hailed as America’s most important writer about Main Street, USA. He has said that he wants that which “is hilarious and that which is heartbreaking to occupy the same territory in the books because he thinks they very often occupy the same territory in life, much as we try to separate them.” He was editor of The Best American Short Stories 2010.

Richard Russo's Books

Jim Shepard

The Village Voice calls Jim Shepard a “pointillist master of middle-American disaffection, second-shoe-dropping comic rhythm, pop-cult radiation, and the deceivingly unsimple art of inarticulation.” A 2011 featured Literary Sojourn author, Shepard is the author of seven novels and four story collections who returns to Steamboat Springs with his newest book, The Book of Aron (due out in May), a novel about the Holocaust and the children caught up in it. Fellow author John Irving says, “A fictional, first-person narrative from the point of view of a Jewish child in Warsaw…is very brave…and may not be what many readers are expecting from a novelist and short-story writer whose ironic touch is often comedic. But Jim Shepard has written a Holocaust novel that stands with the most powerful writing on that terrible subject.” Library Journal calls it “indispensable reading.” Shepard’s story collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway, was a finalist for the National Book Award and won The Story Prize.  His short fiction has appeared in, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, New Yorker, Granta and Playboy, among others. Four of his stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories.

Jim Shepard's Books

2014 Authors

Anthony Doerr

Anthony Doerr is the author of five books, including his new novel, All the Light We Cannot See. Author Jess Walter calls Doerr’s new book “a dazzling, epic work of fiction. [He] writes beautifully about the mythic and the intimate, about snails on beaches and armies on the move, about fate and love and history and all those breathless, unbearable moments when they all come crashing together.” Doerr’s fiction has won four O. Henry Prizes, three Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, and the Story Prize. His books also include two short story collections, The Shell Collector and Memory Wall; a novel, About Grace; and a memoir, Four Seasons in Rome. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. Doerr’s books have been named twice to the New York Times Notable Book list, and honored as an American Library Association Book of the Year. The literary magazine Granta hailed Doerr as one of its 21 Best Young American Novelists. 

Anthony Doerr's books

 

Emily St. John Mandel

Emily St. John Mandel’s forthcoming novel, Station Eleven, is an audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse. Her three highly acclaimed previous novels, Last Night in Montreal, The Singer's Gun and The Lola Quartet, were all tapped as Indie Next picks, and The Singer's Gun won the 2014 Prix Mystere de la Critique in France. “Mandel's talent is clearly visible from the get-go ... The beauty of the novel is that its key truths are those the reader arrives at on his or her own, without the help of a straight-line narrative or a dominating perspective. Instead, Mandel feeds off of our need to make connections, even when the pattern they form doesn't really exist. We start with anxiety and end with it, thrumming in the background for us to listen in – or ignore, at both cost and reward,"  says The Los Angeles Times. The Boston Globe applauds Mandel’s “charismatic verbal grace and acuity, the rich atmosphere she creates.” Mandel is a staff writer for The Millions, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2013 and Venice Noir.

Emily St. John Mandel's books

 

Curtis Sittenfeld

Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the bestselling novels Sisterland, American Wife, Prep and The Man of My Dreams.  In her newest novel, Sisterland, Sittenfeld brings to life the tale of twin sisters, whose relationship and identities are shaken when one of them goes on television to predict a devastating earthquake.  Lauded for her rich, nuanced writing and pointed social commentary, USA Today calls Sisterland “wise and often wickedly entertaining…Readers who have siblings—especially women with sisters—will likely come away feeling as if the author really is psychic, able to learn the truth of their own dark secrets, and forgive them.” Sittenfeld attracted nationwide attention with her New York Times bestselling debut, Prep – an insightful and achingly funny coming-of-age story the Boston Globe called “as addictive as M&Ms, but also a tart and complex tale of social class, race, and gender politics.”  Her third novel, American Wife, based loosely on the life of First Lady Laura Bush, received stellar reviews and was named one of the Ten Best Books of the Year by Time, People and Entertainment Weekly. Both Prep and American Wife were nominated for the Orange Prize.

Curtis Sittenfeld's books

 

Colm Tóibín

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, journalist, critic and poet. He is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review, the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and is currently the Mellon Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

His novels include Brooklyn, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; The Master, winner of the Dublin IMPAC Prize, the Prix du Meilleur Livre and the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year; The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin and Booker prizes; The Story of the Night, winner of the Ferro- Grumley Prize; The Heather Blazing, winner of the Encore Award; and The South, winner of the Irish Times/Aer Lingus First Fiction Award. His short story collections include, The Empty Family and Mothers and Sons, and essay collections include New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers & Their Families and All a Novelist Needs, a compilation of his writings on Henry James. Tóibín’s 2012 Broadway play,Testament of Mary, received three Tony Award nominations, including Best Play.

Colm Tóibín's books

 

Daniel Woodrell

In Daniel Woodrell’s first novel since Winter’s Bone (2006), The Maid’s Version tells of a deadly dance hall fire and its impact over several generations. It is a gritty, lyrical story inspired by a real catastrophe in a small town. Publishers Weekly raves, “Woodrell’s evocative, lyrical ninth novel is deceptively brief and packs a shimmering, resonant, literary punch…From an economy of poetic prose springs forth an emotionally volcanic story of family, justice, and the everlasting power of the truth.” Five of Woodrell novels have been selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for the Novel in 1999, and The Death of Sweet Mister received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction. His first collection of stories, The Outlaw Album, was published in 2011. Winter’s Bone was adapted into a film with four Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.

Daniell Woodrell's books

 

Karen Joy Fowler

Karen Joy Fowler is a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Nebula Award winner and 2008 featured Literary Sojourn author who returns in 2014 as Sojourn’s Master of Ceremonies. NPR’s “All Things Considered” calls Fowler’s newest novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, “absolutely sublime,” and author Barbara Kingsolver writes in the New York Times Book Review that it is “a novel so readably juicy and surreptitiously smart, it deserves all the attention it can get.” Author of six novels and three short story collections, Fowler’s previous novel, The Jane Austen Book Club, spent 13 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Wit’s End portrayed the signature oddball and endearing characters that also earned her novel Sarah Canary the distinction of being a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. “No contemporary writer creates characters more appealing, or examines them with greater acuity and forgiveness, than she does,” raves Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon.

Karen Joy Fowler's books

 

2013 Authors

 

Augusten Burroughs

Memoirist Augusten Burroughs is the New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors, Dry, A Wolf at the Table, Possible Side Effects, Magical Thinking, You Better Not Cry and This is How. He is also the author of the novel Sellevision, a story he wrote in a mere seven days over the course of sobering up. Running with Scissors, a tragicomic story of Burroughs’ childhood, was released to virtually unanimous critical acclaim and became a publishing phenomenon that has been cited for igniting memoir fever in America and abroad. Running with Scissors was adapted into a film starring Alec Baldwin, Jill Clayburgh and Gwyneth Paltrow. Burrough’s writing has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers around the world including The New York Times and New York Magazine. Entertainment Weekly has twice named him one of “The 25 Funniest People in America.”

Buy Augusten Burrough's books

 

Emma Donoghue

With stirring storytelling and memorable, empathetic characters, Emma Donoghue stunned the world with her critically acclaimed international bestseller Room, which was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man Booker, Commonwealth, and Orange Prizes. The New Yorker called Room “an astounding, terrifying novel…a testament to Donoghue’s imagination and empathy that she is able to fashion radiance from such horror.” In her new collection of 14 short stories, Astray, Donoghue, an Irish expat herself, introduces her readers to wandering individuals inspired by historical people in fact-inspired stories about travels to, from and within North America. “Time and again, Emma Donoghue writes books that are unlike anything I have ever seen before, and Astray is no exception. There is such a deep and compassionate imagination at work in every story in this collection that Astray feels almost like an act of clairvoyance,” says Ann Patchett. The author of 15 books, Donoghue shifts genres from literary history, biography, and stage and radio plays, to fairy tales and short stories. In addition to Room, her novels include Slammerkin, The Sealed Letter, Landing, and Life Mask.

Emma Donoghue's Books

 

Jennifer Haigh

New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh won the PEN/Hemingway Award for her novel Mrs. Kimble and the PEN/Winship Award for her novel Baker Towers. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the author of four critically acclaimed novels that also include Faith and The Condition, and a new collection of ten interconnected short stories, News From Heaven, which return to her vividly imagined world of Bakerton, Pennsylvania, a coal mining town rocked by decades of painful transition. “Jennifer Haigh’s stories rove across time and cultures as easily as they render the tendernesses and longings and hardscrabble deprivations of home. News From Heaven is well-named, given that its unsentimental compassion and observational acuity — as well as its quiet insistence that the personal is the political — is just what we need right now,” says author Jim Shepard. “This is a masterly collection,” says Library Journal in its starred review. Haigh’s short fiction has been published widely, in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories 2012, and many other publications.

 Jennifer Haigh's Books

 

Ron Rash

Ron Rash has been called the “Bard of Appalachia.” The North Carolina native is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Cove and the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Finalist and New York Times bestselling novel, Serena, in addition to three other prize-winning novels, One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River and The World Made Straight. He has published three collections of poems and four collections of stories, including his newest book, Nothing Gold Can Stay, Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, which was a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award. The New York Times called Serena a “fierce, breathtaking book, one of the greatest American novels in recent memory.”  Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo says, “Ron Rash is a writer of both the darkly beautiful and the sadly true…The Cove, solidifies his reputation as one of our very finest novelists.” Twice the recipient of the O. Henry Prize, Rash is the Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina University.

Ron Rash's Books

 

Jess Walter

A National Book Award finalist for Citizen Vince and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Zero, Jess Walter is the author of six novels, one nonfiction book and a collection of short stories. Last year’s Beautiful Ruins was a New York Times bestseller that NPR’s Fresh Air called “a literary miracle.” The Financial Lives of the Poets ranked in 2009 as Time Magazine's No. 2 novel of the year, a book that Esquire called, "Brilliant – and brilliantly funny." Kirkus Reviews starred his new short story collection, We Live in Water, proclaiming it “a witty and sobering snapshot of recession-era America." Walter’s work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper's, Esquire, McSweeney's, Byliner, Playboy, ESPN the Magazine, Details and other publications. Walter lives with his wife and three children in his childhood home of Spokane, Washington.

Jess Walter's Books

 

Andre Dubus III, Master of Ceremonies

New York Times bestselling author Andre Dubus III returns to Literary Sojourn as Master of Ceremonies. Dubus is the author of five books, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, Bluesman, House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his critically acclaimed memoir, Townie, which was a New York Times "Editors Choice." Published in 2011, Townie tells his story of growing up with three siblings and their exhausted working mother after the departure of his father, the late short story master, Andre Dubus, in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. Richard Russo says, “I've never read a better or more serious meditation on violence, its sources, consequences, and, especially, its terrifying pleasures than Townie." Dubus has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and is a 2012 recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He lives in northeastern Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.

 Andre Dubus III's books

 

See you at the Sojourn!

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