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Powell's Books Presents William Brewer in Conversation With Kimberly King Parsons

When a once-promising young writer agrees to ghostwrite a famous physicist’s memoir, his livelihood is already in jeopardy: Plagued by debt, he’s grown distant from his wife — a successful AI designer — and is haunted by an overwhelming sense of dread he describes as “The Mist.” Then, things get worse: The physicist vanishes, leaving everything in limbo, including our narrator’s sanity. Desperate for relief, he undergoes an experimental, psychedelic treatment and finds his world completely transformed: Joy suffuses every moment. For the first time, he understands himself in a larger, universal context, and feels his life shift, refract, and crack open to reveal his past and future alike. Moving swiftly from a chemical spill in West Virginia to Silicon Valley, from a Brooklyn art studio to a high-speed train racing across the Italian countryside, William Brewer’s The Red Arrow (Knopf) wades into the shadowy depths of the human psyche only to emerge, as if speeding through a mile-long tunnel, into a world that is so bright and wondrous, it almost feels completely new. The Red Arrow is a singular, cosmically charged journey through art, memory, and the ways our lives intertwine and align within the riddles of space and time. Brewer will be joined in conversation by Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light.

May 24, 2022 05:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)