Novelist N. M. Kelby will be in Syracuse for a workshop and reading/signing in Syracuse at the Downtown Writer’s Center. Kelby is the author of the new collection of short stories, A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts, out next month from Borealis Books. She has another book out the same month from Writers Digest, The Constant Art of Being a Writer: The Life, Art & Business of Fiction.
Kelby is available for interviews and review copies of A Travel Guide for
Reckless Hearts is available upon request. More information on the book is
below. For a video of Kelby reading from the book, visit
http://www.nmkelby.com/www.nmkelby.com/Movie.html
Writing Workshop and Reading with N. M. Kelby
Sept. 15 and 16
Downtown Writer’s Center – ymcaofgreatersyracuse.org/downtown/programs.aspx?ac=141>
YWCA of Greater Syracuse
340 Montgomery Street
Syracuse 474-6851
Forthcoming from Borealis Books Sept. 15. $15.95 paper 978-0-87351-767-6
Here is what people are saying about Kelby:
“N. M. Kelby has long been one of my favorite writers, and her new story collection, A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts, is the sweet, pure, hilarious, sneakily profound essence of her. We ache and we laugh: this is the experience of reading N. M. Kelby just as it is the experience of living in the 21st century.”
-Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize winning author of A Good Scent from a
Strange Mountain, and the forthcoming novel, Hell
“This is a collection of love stories, each and every one of them true to what goes on between us when our hearts collide. Beautiful, sweet, and a little sad: love, exactly. N. M. Kelby knows a thing or two.”
-Daniel Wallace, author of four novels including Big Fish, which was also a film of the same name
“Kelby peeks into the hidden places of the heart, the sweet spot where love dwells.”
-Patti Callahan Henry, author of six novels, including Between the Tides
A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts is a collection of stories, rooted in the Midwest and cultivated in the Deep South, for those of us who suddenly find ourselves tourists in our own lives.
Reminiscent of the work of Lorrie Moore and Jill McCorkle, this ten-story collection features the sweetly offbeat love story “Jubilation, Florida,”where two highly unlikable people share dairy products, and “The Faithful,” a funny yet tender story about a family torn apart by their beautiful mother Kitty, who will not give up her coyote fur or cat’s-eye sunglasses for anything. We also meet landlocked mermaids and a twisted Camp Fire Girl troop who will do anything to sell the most P-Nuttles in history. The collection offers four new stories, including the riotous “The Last Rites,” featuring Zimmer, a rock idol who “had always wanted to be buried in his 1953 Cadillac Eldorado convertible” and is not disappointed.
Kelby’s stories have appeared on National Public Radio’s “Selected Shorts,” on NPR’s CD Travel Tales, and in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2006
More Praise for N. M. Kelby
“Kelby is a natural-born storyteller who manages to be very funny and very wise at the same time.” -Carl Hiaasen, best-selling author and columnist
for The Miami Herald
“To read Kelby’s novel is, in its own words, to fall into a dream.” -New York Times Book Review
N. M. Kelby is the author of The Constant Art of Being a Writer and several novels, including the best seller In the Company of Angels, and Murder at the Bad Girls Bar and Grill. She is working on the movie Whale Season with Dwight Yoakam. She resides in Sarasota, Florida.
