Loading…
Back To Schedule
Saturday, April 21 • 12:00pm - 1:15pm
Author reading and signing: Tom McAllister

Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Tweet Share
Feedback form is now closed.
Author Tom McAllister will read from his latest release "How to Be Safe", with signing to follow.

This book received a starred review from Kirkus Review.


A brilliant, tragically timely second novel from the author of The Young Widower’s Handbook (2017).
FORMER TEACHER HAD MOTIVE. When this chyron rolls across the bottom of a cable news segment, Anna Crawford becomes complicit in a high school shooting. Never mind that she had nothing to do with the crime; once she’s part of the story, she’s guilty of...something. This novel is an indictment of gun culture, hot-take journalism, and social media, and if that sounds like a miserable premise for a novel, fear not: McAllister is a brave and stylish writer, and Anna is a singular creation. At first, she seems like a classic unreliable narrator, but it quickly becomes hard to decide which is crazier: Anna or the world she’s describing. As a one-time teacher and a thoroughgoing misfit—she was fired for being “unpredictable” just before the shooting—Anna is perfectly positioned to understand the shooter even as she recognizes that both his teen angst and his deadly rage are hackneyed. Once she achieves secondhand fame, she notes that the strangers who want to kill her, those who want to rape her, and those who want to do both—in that order—share the same fantasies of dominance. “In America,” she says, “we send children to school to get shot and to learn algebra and physics and history and biology and literature. Less civilized nations don’t have such an organized system for murdering their children. Mass murders in undeveloped countries occur because they are savages.” Anna doesn’t just worry about guns; she sees how misogyny, racism, xenophobia, and classism shape a society in which assault weapons are fetish objects. The horror is offset—or maybe thrown into sharp relief—by moments of mordant humor. When an evangelizing acquaintance tries to frighten Anna with images of darkness and demons and a final battle between good and evil, Anna says, “You might want to make this sound less exciting…I kind of want to not repent just so I can see the whole scene.” Then she adds, “People don’t want to be bored.”
Intensely smart. Sharply written.





Speakers
avatar for Tom McAllister

Tom McAllister

Tom McAllister is the author of the novels How to Be Safe and The Young Widower's Handbook, as well as the memoir Bury Me in My Jersey. He is the non-fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and co-host of the Book Fight! podcast. His shorter work has been published most recently in The Rumpus... Read More →


Saturday April 21, 2018 12:00pm - 1:15pm CDT
KI Convention Center Room B1 333 Main St, Green Bay, WI 54301
  Readers, Reading

Attendees (4)