Thisbie Nissen, Jay Baron Nicorvo

press release:

Thisbe Nissen, author of Our Lady of the Prairie

with Jay Baron Nicorvo, author of The Standard Grand

Wednesday, Jan 31st, 6:00pm

A Room of One's Own is happy to welcome literary power couple Thisbe Nissen, author of Our Lady of the Prairie, and Jay Baron Nicorvo, author of The Standard Grand, for a reading and book signing!

Thisbe Nissen is author of a story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night, and the novels, The Good People of New York and Osprey Island as well as her new novel Our Lady of the Prairie. Her fiction has been published in the Iowa Review and the American Scholar, among others, and her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue and Glamour. She teaches at Western Michigan University.

About Our Lady of the Prairie: In the space of a few torrid months, Phillipa Maakestad—long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter—grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny’s wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband.

Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage. Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election, Thisbe Nissen's new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp—a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.

Jay Baron Nicorvo lives on an old farm outside Battle Creek, Michigan, with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, and a couple dozen vulnerable chickens. He’s the author of a novel, The Standard Grand, picked for IndieBound's Indie Next List, Library Journal's Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, and named "New and Noteworthy" by Poets & Writers. He's published a poetry collection, Deadbeat, and his nonfiction can be found in Salon, Poets & Writers, The Iowa Review, and The Baffler. He's been an editor at Ploughshares and at PEN America, the literary magazine of the PEN American Center, and was membership director for the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses [clmp]. Find Jay at www.nicorvo.net.

About The Standard Grand: When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up sleeping in Central Park. There, she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown Borscht Belt resort. Converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans, the Standard—and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Shale Formation—is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. Toward what end, only a corporate executive knows. Jay Baron Nicorvo's The Standard Grand confronts a glaring cultural omission: the absence of women in our war stories. Like the best of its characters—who aspire more to goodness than greatness—this American novel hopes to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric.