Start: 7:00 pm
End: 8:30 pm
We're very happy to host Portland author Leni Zumas, who will be reading from her debut novel.
Hypnotic and profoundly disquieting, The Listeners explores a far-out world where a patchwork of memory, sensation, and imagination maps the flickering presence of ghosts.
This is the story of a woman whose life is shaped by tragedy. Quinn is thirty-something, a survivor
of a fractured and eccentric childhood marred by the death of her younger sister. Twenty years later, she is in the midst of a decade-long slide down the other side of punk-rock stardom after her
successful music career was abruptly halted. Quinn develops unique strategies for coping, but she cannot keep the past away. The Listeners is about what lurks in the shadows and what happens when what's lurking insists on being seen.
Zumas portrays a world twisted on its axis by loss, in all its grotesque beauty. From the first line the prose is glorious: pricklingly honest and hallucinatory, a lucid dream world realized. The Listeners marks the debut of a major American writer.
Leni Zumas is also the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008). She is an assistant professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Portland State University.
