Third Place Books Virtual Event! Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, in conversation with Richard Chiem - Sleepovers

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, in conversation with Richard Chiem - Sleepovers

Thursday, July 16, 2020 - 7:00pm

Virtual Event presented by Third Place Books

This is a virtual event! Register for this Livestream Event Here!

"There's some kind of crazy magic at work here-- the way that Ashleigh Bryant Phillips takes all the little pieces of daily life that are there in plain sight just laying around and when she gathers them together they become holy, hilarious, transcendent, and unspeakably beautiful. 

"Her style is utterly her own, with wonderful echoes of Carson McCullers, Flannery O'Connor and Larry Brown mixed in. Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is shockingly talented. I don't think the voices of her characters will ever leave my head." --Mesha Maren, author of Sugar Run

Hailed by Lauren Groff as "fully committed to the truth no matter how dark or difficult or complicated it may be," Sleepovers, the debut short story collection by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips, takes us to a forgotten corner of the rural South, full of cemeteries, soybean fields, fishing holes, and Duck Thru gas stations. 

We meet a runaway teen, a mattress salesman, feral kittens, an elderly bachelorette wearing a horsehair locket, and a little girl named after Shania Twain. Here, time and memory circle above Phillips' characters like vultures and angels, as they navigate the only landscape they've ever known. 

Corn reaches for rain, deer run blindly, and no matter how hungry or hurt, some forgotten hymn is always remembered. "The literary love child of Carson McCullers and John the Baptist, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips' imagination is profoundly original and private," writes Rebecca Lee. Sleepovers marks the debut of a fearless new voice in fiction.

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips is from rural Woodland, North Carolina. She's a graduate of Meredith College and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her stories have appeared in The Oxford American, The Paris Review and others

Richard Chiem is the author of You Private Person (Sorry House Classics, 2017), and the novel, King of Joy (Soft Skull, 2019), which was long listed for the 2020 PEN Open Book Award. He was named a 2019 Writer to Watch by the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at Hugo House, Catapult, and at the University of Washington Bothell. He lives in Seattle.

Third Place Books is located in Town Center, upper level, intersection of Bothell and Ballinger Way in Lake Forest Park. They can be reached at 206-366-3333.