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HONEYMOONS IN TEMPORARY LOCATIONS launch event at Moon Palace Books with Ashley Shelby and Eric Holthaus
June 25 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm CST
Join Ashley Shelby at Moon Palace Books on Thursday, June 25, at 6:00 p.m. to celebrate the launch of her new book, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations. Ashley will be discussing her book in conversation with Eric Holthaus.
This event is free and open to the public. Masks required in the store.
Climate disaster–induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby’s collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange.
“In Ashley Shelby’s brilliant, daring, and innovative collection Honeymoons in Temporary Locations, the reader is plunged into a world of climate change and feelings of loss that come with it. In Shelby’s imagination, trees walk, birds and polar bears talk, and all of them look to humans to answer the question, ‘Why?’ With stories told in a variety of forms from traditional pieces of short fiction to future restaurant menus to online advertisements, Shelby digs deep into the grief of a changing world and all who are affected by it.” —Alex DiFrancesco, author of All City
“Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is a deeply felt, deeply imagined collection of dispatches from the weirdest extrapolatory fringes of the world we’ve made, the world we’ve allowed to happen. Ashley Shelby has kaleidoscopic vision—from climate disaster tourism brochures to refugee camps for the rich to talking bears, she has created a vivid, terrifying, and unexpected landscape. There is a profound grief that runs through these stories, grief over what is becoming of our natural world as a result of our very unnatural way of living, but also a sense of connection.” —Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise
“Writer Ashley Shelby’s storytelling is brisk, sharp-elbowed and deeply empathetic, even as she experiments with a host of forms, including the brochure text for a cruise to flooded cities.” —Scientific American
“Tongue-in-cheek, mournful, and inventive, Honeymoons in Temporary Locations is a bracing collection of cautionary tales regarding the too-probable near future.” —Foreword Reviews, starred review
