Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets 14th & V welcomes Jen Michalski to present their new book "The Summer She Was Under Water" and Ron Tanner to present their new book "Missile in Paradise."
Based in Baltimore, Michalski has published several collections of short fiction and the award-winning novel The Tide King, in addition to editing the anthology City Sages: Baltimore. Her second novel is a tour de force look at a complex family whose fraught past refuses to stay in the past. Unfolding over a long Fourth of July weekend, the narrative explores the Pinski family’s history of mental illness, alcoholism, and violence as understood by Sam Pinski. A novelist, Sam works her family’s ongoing trauma into her writing, and Michalski deftly shows how reality is both transformed and revealed by art.
Tanner is an award-winning writer of both fiction and nonfiction and he teaches writing at Loyola University-Maryland. His latest novel is a sharp satire of America’s imperialist inclinations, set on one of the Marshall Islands in 2004. Still bearing the scars of the Cold War-era nuclear tests, the island is no Pacific paradise, and Tanner deftly interweaves the wildly divergent experiences of the Marshallese and the U.S. forces stationed there, as the War on Terror heats up.
