Books Inc. Berkeley hosts Lynn Stegner in conversation with poet and writer Anita Barrows on October 23 at 7 pm.
Lynn Stegner’s acclaimed novels and story collections have drawn comparisons to the works of Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Munro, and John Updike. Now in her new novel, The Half-Life of Guilt, Stegner tells the story of Clair Bugato and Mason Comstock. Together they journey to the world’s largest saltworks in Baja California, where a proposed expansion threatens the California gray whale population, recently come back from the brink of extinction.
No other work of fiction patterns the warp and weft of human guilt, the homesickness only love can cure, environmental crises, the intrinsic conflict between international commerce and planetary health, and the necessity of forgiveness. The Half-Life of Guilt is woven from these themes, delivering to the reader an engrossing and transformative literary experience.
Anita Barrows has received awards for her poetry from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Robinson Jeffers Foundation, and publications by The Quarterly Review of Literature and the Riverstone Press.
She has three volumes of poetry published by Kelsay Books: Exile, We Are the Hunger, and Testimony. Her three poetry chapbooks from Quelquefois Press are housed, among other places, in libraries in Baghdad and Kabul, in the British Museum, and in university collections throughout the United States.
Books Inc. is a collection of independently owned and operated bookstores proudly serving and supporting the Bay Area since 1851! There are 11 stores across the east bay, peninsula, and San Francisco, including two in SFO, allowing us to reach nearly every corner of this incredible slice of California.