BUY BOOK

June 23rd | 7pm CST

The Sound of Rabbits | Janice Deal

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ABOUT THE BOOK

“The Sound of Rabbits is a deeply affecting and powerful novel.” —Lynn Sloan, author of Midstream, Principles of Navigation, and This Far Isn’t Far Enough

The Sound of Rabbits tells the story of Ruby, a bright woman with a love of music who thought that leaving the small town where she grew up would ensure her happiness. But her life in Chicago is not going the way she’d planned. At 41, she’s drifted away from music, and a long-term relationship with a boyfriend has ended badly. Everything changes with one phone call from her sister, Val, who cares for their mother, Barbara, in the hardscrabble Midwestern town where Ruby grew up. Ruby returns to confront some harsh truths about her family and herself as she tries to find meaning in her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s disease. Written as an homage to the classic archetype of the Hero’s Journey, The Sound of Rabbits relies on different points of view to explore themes of change and death, and considers the role that the past—and acceptance of that past—can play in one’s current and future happiness.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JANICE DEAL is the author of the short story collection The Decline of Pigeons (Queen’s Ferry, 2013), which was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Stories from her upcoming linked story collection Strange Attractors (New Door Books, September 2023) won The Moth Short Story Prize and the Cagibi Macaron Prize. She is also the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship Award for prose. Her stories have appeared in Fiction, Harvard Review Online, The Sun, Emrys Journal, Ontario Review, and Zone 3. The Sound of Rabbits is her first novel. Janice lives with her husband in the Chicago area.

ABOUT KATHY BERGEN

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 and economic issues facing the region. As one of the lead reporters covering Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid, she followed the Mayor Richard M. Daley’s bid team to the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and to Copenhagen in 2009 for the final vote. 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 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 at Fudan University in Shanghai in 2014.