A Great Good Place for Books invites you to join Thisbe Nissen, author of Our Lady of the Prairie in conversation with Jay Baron Nicorvo, author of The Standard Grand, Wednesday, February 28th 7:00 p.m.

ABOUT OUR LADY OF THE PRAIRIE:

The book is a sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish life gives way to a vortex of crises—and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself. 
For Phillipa Maakestad - long-married theater professor and long-suffering mother to troubled, volatile Ginny – life is finally calm. Ginny is stable and about to settle down with a loving, devoted man. Philippa can exhale at long last. What better moment to fall headlong into a passionate affair, fly off to france with her new lover, and effectively take a match to her life on the Iowa prairie. 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.

“Thisbe Nissen’s Our Lady of the Prairie is a Midwestern fever dream, a bold and ambitious look into the roiling emotions of a woman caught between should and could, between I must and I want. I found it funny, angry, hopeful, heartfelt, and above all, honest: about marriage, family, and that old-fashioned, endlessly fascinating thing called desire.” —Joshua Ferris 

“Our Lady of the Prairie is a marvel of a book: exuberant, frisky, and fierce. Thisbe Nissen’s surprising storytelling is matched only by her ability to conjure such a terrific heroine: a woman brimming with desire and rage, and a need for secrets to step into the light.” —Edan Lepucki

ABOUT THISBE NISSEN: 
THISBE NISSEN is author of a story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night, and two novels, The Good People of New York and Osprey Island. 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 and lives in Battle Creek, Michigan, with writer Jay Baron Nicorvo, and their son.”

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 is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. Toward what end, only a corporate executive knows. Called “an important and deeply human contribution to the national conversation” (Booklist, starred review), 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 — the novel hopes to darn a hole or two in the frayed national fabric.

“Nicorvo is a bracingly original writer and a joy to read.” ―Dennis Lehane

“A desperate masterpiece of a debut” that tells a huge-hearted American saga―of love, violence, war, conspiracy and the aftermath of them all.” ―Bonnie Jo Campbell

ABOUT JAY BARON NICORVO:

JAY BARON NICORVO lives on an old farm outside Battle Creek, Michigan, with his wife, Thisbe Nissen, their son, and a couple of dozen vulnerable chickens. He is the author of a novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin’s Press), picked for IndieBound’s Indie Next List and Library Journal’s Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts, as well as named “New and Noteworthy” by Poets & Writers Magazine. He has published a poetry collection, Deadbeat (Four Way Books), and is working on a memoir.