Mark Your Calendars! Our First Author Event: Elliot Reed

One of the things we're most looking forward to is welcoming writers to Skylark to talk about their books and writing. There are already some wonderful authors scheduled to come and speak - you can read about them all here. All events are open to the public and completely free. 

We wanted to tell you about our inaugural event, which takes place on Tuesday, September 11. Elliot Reed has written one of the most eagerly awaited fiction debuts of the year, A Key to Treehouse Living. For fans of Mark Haddon, Tony Earley, and Jonathan Safran Foer, this is an epic tale of boyhood from an unforgettable new voice.

It's fair to say that I've never read a novel quite like this one. It's wildly ambitious and Reed has adopted a brilliant and innovative structure: the novel is presented as a list of definitions of peculiar terms such as ASPHALT PATHS, BETTA FISH, MULLET, MORTAL BETRAYAL, NIHILISM, and REVELATION. The compiler of this strange list, a boy called William Tyce, is trying to make sense of his existence by this dogged process of idiosyncratic codification. 

Unlocking an earnest, clear-eyed way of thinking that might change your own, A Key to Treehouse Living is a story about keeping your own record straight and living life by a different code.

And don't just take our word for it. Acclaimed novelist Joshua Ferris writes: “A Key to Treehouse Living by Elliot Reed scrambles up all the customary codes of the novel to piece together, at last, the moving story of a lost boy searching out his place in the world. What appears as all indexed coda turns out to be a well-told tale and, more vitally for me, the accumulation of enormous incidental pleasures.” 

Elliot will be speaking at Skylark at 7:00 p.m. with a book signing to follow. There will also be some live musical entertainment before the event. Come by and help us launch our first author visit with a bang!