
Join us at Yorktown Center for a signing of Janice Deal’s book “The Blue Door” in conversation with Kathy Bergen April 25th | 7pm CST
April 25 @ 7:00 pm

April 25th | 7pm CST
The Blue Door | Janice Deal
We kindly request that if you would like your book signed, it must be purchased at Barbara’s Bookstore. To ensure a smooth and efficient signing process, please present your receipt as proof of purchase.
ABOUT THE BOOK
How much responsibility and guilt can a mother bear for a child who has done wrong?
These are the questions that haunt Flo when her daughter Teddy plans to visit after a long separation. The prospect of seeing Teddy brings back painful memories of Teddy’s troubled past—a young teen imprisoned for committing murder. Can Flo find the strength to support or even cope with her daughter as she is now? Can she resurrect hope for either of them? Flo must thrash through these questions alone; her dear friend and confidant has just died. Then, as she’s grappling with grief and guilt, her dog goes missing, and she takes a long walk to find him. On the surface, this is all that happens: A simple walk through a desert town. Encounters with people who uplift or unsettle her along the way. But for Flo, this journey becomes much more—a personal odyssey, as profound and disorienting as Ulysses’. She remembers an old folktale passed down by her family, about a young woman’s mythical journey to find her place in the world. Echoes of this tale play through the current story, and the hunt for Dog turns into a metaphysical search for meaning.
Some readers will recall Flo and Teddy from Strange Attractors, the outstanding collection that critics compared to Chekhov and Flannery O’Connor. As her sequel to the mother-daughter story unfolds, Janice Deal once more reveals the extraordinary depths of unpretentious people. The Blue Door is a radical adventure, both compulsively readable and meditative— a rare combination.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janice Deal is the author of three previous books of fiction: Strange Attractors: The Ephrem Stories; The Sound of Rabbits, a novel; and The Decline of Pigeons: Stories. The recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose, Janice has won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. Her books have also been finalists for the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year, the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Black Lawrence Press Big Moose Prize, and the Many Voices Project annual competition. She lives with her husband in the Chicago area. Visit her website at janicedeal.com.
Kathy Bergen is a journalist and fiction writer based in Chicago. As an editor and award-winning reporter for the Chicago Tribune for 25 years, she covered urban affairs, economic issues and the city’s standing on the world stage. She’s now working on a set of linked short stories set in post-WWII Europe. Most recently, she’s had short fiction published in Consequence, The McNeese Review and The Briar Cliff Review. A graduate of the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, she also was a fellow in the National Press Foundation’s program on China’s emergence as an economic power, held in Shanghai in 2014.
Details
- Date:
- April 25
- Time:
-
7:00 pm
- Event Categories:
- AUTHORS, EVENTS, IN-STORE
- Event Tags:
- author signing, barbaras bookstore, book signing, chicago, event, Janice Deal, the blue door, Yorktown center
Venue
- Yorktown
-
Space 120 Yorktown Shopping Center
Lombard, IL 60148 United States + Google Map