Opening Night Reception
Raise a glass to reading and celebrate
the best book fest in the upper midwest
Friday, October 18, 6–7:30pm
New Venue: Spaces at MoZaic East (1330 Lagoon Ave #400, Minneapolis)
Rain Taxi invites you to a celebratory #TCBF shindig! Mingle with visiting authors, local luminaries, and others in our vibrant literary community. Your entry ticket includes light refreshments, book lover’s swag, and a lively on-stage conversation with iconic Minnesota author Charles Baxter!
Baxter’s new novel, Blood Test: A Comedy, will be released on October 15. To help welcome it into the world, this special event will present Baxter in conversation with Chicago author Miles Harvey, an acclaimed nonfiction writer who has just published his debut book of stories, The Registry of Forgotten Objects—praised effusively by Baxter among many others. Don’t miss being in the room for this one-of-a-kind conversation!
Advance ticket sales have concluded. You may purchase tickets at the door.
Can’t make it, but want to support the TCBF?
Pre-purchase your signed copies! (Can be picked up at event or shipped the following Monday.)
Blood Test by Charles Baxter
$30 includes sales tax. Media mail shipping $4.50, additional books $1.50 each.
The Registry of Forgotten Objects
by Miles Harvey
$25 includes sales tax. Media mail shipping $4.50, additional books $1.50 each.
About the Authors
CHARLES BAXTER is the author of the novels The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter lives in Minneapolis.
About Blood Test
In this fresh take on love and trouble in America, Brock Hobson, an insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher, finds his equilibrium disturbed by the results of a predictive blood test. Baxter, a master storyteller, brings us a gradually building rollercoaster narrative, and a protagonist who is impertinent, searching, and hilariously relatable. From his good-as-gold, gentle girlfriend to the macho subcontractor guy his ex-wife left him for, not to mention his well-raised teenage kids, now exploring sex and sexuality, the secondary characters in Brock's life all contribute meaningfully to the drama, as increasing challenges to his sense of self and purpose crash over him. The final battle—no spoilers, but there is one—couldn't be more delightful, as this quick and bracing novel reminds us to choose the best people to love, accept the ones we love even if we didn’t choose them, and love them all well.
“Riotously funny. . . . At its core, this is a disarmingly sweet novel about family, an entertainment with just the right amount of Midwestern menace.”
“Blood Test is a funny, morally luminous, altogether irresistible caper that somehow, wonderfully, calls to mind both Nietzsche and Charles Portis. What a maestro Charles Baxter is.”
About The Registry of Forgotten Objects
In this haunting debut collection, best-selling author Miles Harvey probes the mysterious relationship between human longings and the secret lives of inanimate objects. In one story, an artist discovers an uncanny ability to transform modern sculptures into priceless ancient treasures. In another, a teenager experiences visions of other people’s pasts while vandalizing their abandoned houses. In a third, a grieving couple returns again and again to the beach where their son disappeared, pulling plastic bottles, fishing nets, buoys, and other bits of beach trash from the surf “as if those random bits of wreckage were the untranslated hieroglyphs of some secret language that might help them understand their loss.”
“Reading Miles Harvey’s The Registry of Forgotten Objects sated an appetite I hadn’t realized I had. Harvey’s fable-like stories conjure a world full of doors and subtle connections, a place both familiar and endlessly surprising. In our uncertain times, this book offers a powerful and necessary reminder that not only fear but also beauty resides in what is strange and unknown. This linked collection is masterful—one I’ll return to again and again.”
“This astonishingly beautiful book of interlocking stories has at its center things and people that are about to disappear. It is as if all these stories comprise one large story, an emotional journey of the lost and found. Miles Harvey’s book should be read from beginning to end—people and things, such as a barber pole, migrate from one story to another. A wonderful book.”
