In addition to our blockbuster Festival Day at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, this year’s TCBF will feature some “Bookend Events” in other Twin Cities spaces in the weeks before and after. We heartily encourage our audience to extend their fun by attending these special gatherings! Note that some of these events have advance registration available/requested.

Rain Taxi kicks off the 2024 TCBF season with a two-night doubleheader at our longtime partner Magers & Quinn Booksellers—join us for either or both!  We’ve got a pretty good rep for recommending first books that stand out, and we heartily endorse these new novels launching in September. In each case, we’ve lined up an author who already had a debut that wowed us to serve as a conversation partner for our featured guest. Also, we’ll have refreshments on hand to kick off your literary season in style. See you there!

Wednesday, September 11, 2024, 7:00 pm
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
3038 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis

As it follows Edith’s years-long journey away from the person she loves most and toward a hazy new understanding of who she will become, Still Life (Norton) is a profound and piercing tribute to messy webs of queer friendship and to what is left behind in transition. Katherine Packert Burke, a graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the MFA program at the University of Alabama, has just moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. For this welcome and book launch, she will be in conversation with poet Torrin Greathouse, author of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award-winning Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions) and a new work, DEED (Wesleyan University Press).

Free event! To register and get more info, click here

Thursday September 12, 2024, 7:00pm
Magers & Quinn Booksellers
3038 Hennepin Avenue, Minneapolis

Hailed by Luis Alberto Urrea as “a tour de force” from “the new master”, Freedom Is A Feast (Little, Brown and Co.) is a Latin American saga of love and revolution in which a rebel who commits a youthful betrayal receives a late-life chance at redemption and a new life. Alejandro Puyana, who came to the United States from Venezuela at the age of twenty-six, received his MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas, and resides in Austin, Texas with his wife and daughter. He will be in conversation with Nigar Alam, author of Under the Tamarind Tree (Putnam, 2023), a generation-spanning epic which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Book Prize. 

Free event! To register and get more info, click here

More Bookend Event listings coming soon!