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Christine Sneed at Skylight Books
August 25, 2023 @ 7:00 pm–8:00 pm
Join NUP authors Christine Sneed and Yxta Maya Murray as they present Direct Sunlight at Skylight books!
he stories in Direct Sunlight, award-winning author Christine Sneed’s latest, are inspired by the memorable strangeness of everyday life. The characters in these topically diverse tales experience events that bring the terms of their day-to-day lives and their relationships into focus in a way hitherto foreign to them.
The title story features two adult children learning of their father’s second family long after his death in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Mega Millions” explores the aftermath of a small-town midwestern factory employee’s enormous lottery win. In “Dear Kelly Bloom,” a young journalist takes on the role of advice columnist at a faltering Chicago newspaper around the time of the 2008 financial meltdown and soon finds himself tasked with replying to his own mother’s letter requesting guidance on family matters. In “The Monkey’s Uncle Louis,” a contentedly childless man tries to make sense of his sister’s decision to adopt a capuchin monkey after she and her husband find themselves unable to conceive a baby of their own.
CHRISTINE SNEED is the author of three novels and two previous story collections, most recently Please Be Advised and The Virginity of Famous Men. She is also the editor of a collection of short fiction, Love in the Time of Time’s Up. Sneed has received the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, among other honors, and has published stories in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories. She lives in Pasadena, California.
XTA MAYA MURRAY is a novelist, art critic, playwright, and law professor. Her most recent books are the story collection The World Doesn’t Work That Way, but It Could, and the novel Art Is Everything. She has won a Whiting Award and an Art Writer’s Grant and has been named a fellow at the Huntington Library for her work on radionuclide contamination in Simi Valley, California.