This event will take place at our 9th Ave location.
Join us on Tuesday, February 1 at 7pm PT when Leslie Kirk Campbell is joined by Nona Caspers to celebrate the launch of her debut story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, at 9th Ave!
Masks Required for In-Person Attendance
Or register here to watch on Zoom
Pre-order The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs here and receive a signed/personalized copy!
Simply write "signed" or who you would like the book made out to in your online order comment, and we'll handle the rest!
Praise for The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs
“History and memory crosscut through The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs in a gorgeous weave. These are marvelous, stirring stories, sometimes sexy, sometimes harrowing, somehow both timeless and timely. Campbell writes with great depth, patience, wisdom, and beauty.”
—Anthony Doerr, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for All the Light We Cannot See
"The Man With Eight Pairs of Legs, Leslie Kirk Campbell’s prize-winning debut collection of eight stories, is distinguished by the range and diversity of the stories. The seemingly effortless invention of compelling characters entangled in unpredictable situations lends this book a vibrancy and vitality that’s at once sophisticated and utterly natural. And though this is a collection of individual stories, there’s an underlining drive of an intense single voice that gives this book a memorable force."
—Stuart Dybek, MacArthur Fellow and author of Paper Lantern: Love Stories
"Leslie Kirk Campbell's stories immerse you into a complete and layered world where her characters are suspended between self-destruction and rebirth. Hypnotic, strange, and lovely."
—Michelle Wildgen, author of You’re Not You
About The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs
The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs is about the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally – scars, tracks, tattoos; and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. In small towns and cities across the US and beyond (Illinois, Louisiana, Colorado, California, and the Rheinhessen), engineers, opera singers, industrialists, artists, teachers, teenagers, and monks each reckon with their body’s relationship to grief, war, illness, violation, technology and genocide. These stories investigate the ways people both succeed and fail to reconcile their sense of self, their deepest passions, and their own loneliness, through friendship, love, and their own damaged bodies; and how, when confronted with an unexpected encounter with a stranger outside their familiar sphere of reference, a troubled person can experience profound change.
Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, this collection of short stories is a study in compassion, a must-read for our times.
About Leslie Kirk Campbell
Leslie Kirk Campbell's short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares Solos and won awards at Arts & Letters, Southern Indiana Review, Briar Cliff Review and The Thomas Wolfe Review. The author of Journey into Motherhood (Riverhead), Leslie is the mother of two grown sons and teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco. https://lesliekirkcampbell.
About Nona Caspers
The Fifth Woman (Sarabande 2018), Nona Caspers' latest book, was a Mary McCarthy awardee, LAMBDA literary finalist, silver medalist for Best Indie Book of the Year. Buzzfeed listed The Fifth Woman on its “books queers and everyone else should read”. Caspers' book of stories Heavier than Air was a NYTBR Editor’s Choice and Grace Paley Prize in Short fiction. Her fiction has received an NEA fellowship, honorable mention in Best American Short Stories (2016) and a SF Cultural Equity grant, among other awards. Nona Caspers is a professor and chair in the creative department at San Francisco State University. nonacaspers.com
A Man with Eight Pairs of Legs is about the ways our bodies are marked by memory, often literally, and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme. Winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, this collection of short stories is a study in compassion and in passion, a must-read for our times.
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Years after Caspers's unnamed narrator loses her first lover in a tragic accident, she finds herself wondering, "What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?" In vivid, richly detailed vignettes, the book tracks the cyclical nature of grief and remembrance across a life fractured by loss.