Join us for a lively discussion of our March book club read, Chain Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

Join us for a lively discussion of our February book club read, A Magical Girl Returns, by Park Seolyneon.

No agenda, just an evening to chat and connect with other local writers.

Visit with Missouri author Mattie Jo Cowsert and get a signed copy of her new book, God, Sex, and Rich People.

Join us to hear Sleyhouse authors Jeremy Billingsley and Curtis Harrell read from their novels. Jeremy’s new novel Ristenoff just came out this January.

Bring a book and join us in the plush lobby of the Graduate Hotel for some quiet reading time. 📘

Visit with local Arkansas author Marina Lostetter and get a signed copy of her new book, The Teeth of Dawn, the conclusion in The Five Penalties trilogy.

Visit with local Arkansas author Nancy Hartney and get a signed copy of her new book, The Blue Bottle Tree.

Join us for a lively discussion of our January book club read, Babel by R.F. Kuang.

Ask Scrooge. Nothing quite says the holidays like a ghost story. 🌬️❄️ Gather with us for an Ozark ghost story and folk song event with local artists Gus Carlson and Christopher Felton.

Art by Gus Carlson.

This November, we’re is stoked to host a poetry reading and celebration for @brodyparrishcraig and @nevertheless_noelia for their 2024 poetry collections. We can’t wait to hear these poets share their work at this special reading. ❤️🎉

Brody and Noelia’s reading, book signing, and celebration will take place on Thursday, November 14 at 6:30 p.m. at Pearl’s.📚

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Brody Parrish Craig (they/them) is the author of The Patient is an Unreliable Historian (2024) and Boyish, the winner of the 2019 Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. They edited TWANG (2020), a regional collection of trans, gender nonconforming & nonbinary creators tied to the south/midwest (twanganthology.org). Craig is a recipient of the Community Activator Award (2022) and Arkansas Arts Council award for Community Engagement Arts (2024). A graduate of University of Arkansas’ M.F.A. in Creative Writing, they teach at NorthWest Arkansas Community College. Their poems appear in Poetry Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, TYPO and beestung, amongst others.

Noelia Cerna is a Latina poet based in Springdale, AR. She was born in Costa Rica and immigrated to the United States at the age of 7 where she received a Bachelor’s degree in English from Westminster College in Missouri. Her poems have been published in audio form in Terse. Journal and in print in the The Revolution [Relaunch], the Girl Gang blog, the Plants and Poetry Journal and The North Meridian Review. Noelia is a book editor for the North Meridian Review and an award winning writing mentor for Pen America’s Prison Writing Mentorship program.

The Charterhouse of Padma is a book about multiplicity, betrayal, and recovering yourself. 🍾 Celebrate the launch of this sharp, insightful new novel from author and beloved professor Padma Viswanathan on Friday, October 4 at 7 p.m. at Pearl’s Books.

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Padma Viswanathan’s novels have been published in eight countries and shortlisted for the PEN USA Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and others. She has published short fiction, essays and translations from Brazilian Portuguese in Granta, The Boston Review, BRICK, and elsewhere. Full-length translations include São Bernardo, by Graciliano Ramos and Where We Stand, by Djamila Ribeiro. Her most recent books are Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime and The Charterhouse of Padma, a novel. She is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas—Fayetteville, where she is Founding Director of the Arkansas International Writer-at-Risk Residency Program.

We’re thrilled (thrilled!) to have Eli back in-store to chat with us about his unsettling and set-in-NWA crime novel, Broiler. An event you don’t want to miss. Don’t believe us? Just look at that *Praise* below!

About Broiler

Gabriela Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo are hardworking, undocumented employees at the Detmer Foods chicken plant in Springdale, Arkansas, just a stone’s throw away from the trailer park where they’ve lived together for seven years. While dealing with personal tragedies of their own, the young couple endures the brutal, dehumanizing conditions at the plant in exchange for barebones pay.

When the plant manager, Luke Jackson, fires Edwin to set an example for the rest of the workers—and to show the higher-ups that he’s ready for a major promotion—Edwin is determined to get revenge on Luke and his wife, Mimi, a new mother who stays at home with her six-month-old son. Edwin’s impulsive action sets in motion a devastating chain of events that illuminates the deeply entrenched power dynamics between those who revel at the top and those who toil at the bottom.

From the nationally bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author of Don’t Know Tough and Ozark Dogs comes another edge-of-your-seat noir thriller that exposes the dark, bloody heart of life on the margins in the American South and the bleak underside of a bygone American Dream.

*​Praise for Broiler *

Deadly Pleasures Most Anticipated Mysteries and Thrillers of 2024
CrimeReads Most Anticipated Crime Novels of 2024

“Eli Cranor is one of the new big ‘uns. I don’t have the proper term for what he does with words, calm but knowing prose, and nearly Steinbeckian concern for his characters, their woes and petty victories, dreams and shitty jobs. There is conflict and tension and sorrow, but it’s his people who stick.”
—Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter’s Bone

“Not many writers would draw inspiration from such disparate subjects as postpartum anxiety and the squalid conditions in a chicken plant, and fewer still could do the two together justice, but Eli Cranor does one better: he makes them roar. Broiler is the most powerful kind of crime novel—relentlessly tense, ruthlessly observed, and deeply illuminating. It will sing you a lullaby as it grips you by the throat. I loved this novel.”
—Katie Gutierrez, author of More Than You’ll Ever Know

“Eli Cranor has a restless imagination that serves him—and his readers—well. Broiler is his latest Trojan Horse of a novel, a satisfying hunk of noir that tells us far more about the American South than those endless newspaper think pieces set in diners and gas stations. Want to understand what’s going on in the United States right now? Read Eli Cranor.”
—Laura Lippman, New York Times bestselling author of Prom Mom

“Eli Cranor proves all the promise of his Edgar-winning debut and doubles down on it with each new effort. Broiler is grit and muscle on the surface, but it hits deep, populated with characters who linger. Cranor delivers the thrills while in pursuit of bigger game, those special stories born at the intersection of desperation and hope. Don’t miss his work.”
—Michael Koryta, New York Times bestselling author of An Honest Man

“Broiler is the kind of dark, unflinching noir that readers will not be able to ignore, shedding light on the forgotten corners of the American South through the eyes of people so real they leap off the page. It’s hard to believe, but Cranor keeps getting better. His raw prose serves as the perfect messenger for a story that paints a bleak picture—weaving around you slowly before pulling you in tight and refusing to let go. Powerful.”
—Alex Segura, bestselling and award-winning author of Secret Identity and Alter Ego

“Taut, harrowing, and charged with profound insight, Broiler pushes four unforgettable characters to the brim. What happens when hard work isn’t enough? Exploring class, ambition, mobility, and desire, Eli Cranor uses bolts of linguistic electricity to show how the things we want can sometimes blind us.”
—Danya Kukafka, Edgar Award-winning author of Notes on an Execution

About Eli

Nationally-bestselling, Edgar Award-winning author Eli Cranor lives and writes from the banks of Lake Dardanelle where he is the "Writer in Residence" at Arkansas Tech University. 

He is the author of Don't Know Tough and Ozark Dogs, which were both named "Best Crime Novels" of the year by the New York Times, among others. 

Eli also pens a weekly column, "Where I'm Writing From" for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and his craft column, "Shop Talk," appears monthly at CrimeReads.

We’ll be selling copies of Tad DeLay’s book Future of Denial:The Ideologies of Climate Change at this event. Learn more at the event’s Facebook page, or Good Shepherd’s website.

About The Ideologies of Climate Change

Capitalism is an ecocidal engine constantly regenerating climate change denial

The age of denial is over, we are told. Yet emissions continue to rise while gimmicks, graft, and green- washing distract the public from the climate violence suffered by the vulnerable. This timely, interdisciplinary contribution to the environmental humanities draws on the latest climatology, the first shoots of an energy transition, critical theory, Earth’s paleoclimate history, and trends in border violence to answer the most pressing question of our age: Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left?

The symptoms suggest society’s inability to adjust is profound. Near Portland, militias incapable of accepting that the world is warming respond to a wildfire by hunting for imaginary left-wing arsonists. Europe erects nets in the Aegean Sea to capture migrants fleeing drought and war. An airline claims to be carbon neutral thanks to bogus cheap offsets. Drone strikes hit people living along the aridity line. Yes, Exxon knew as early as the 1970s, but the fundamental physics of carbon dioxide warming the Earth was already understood before the American Civil War.

Will capitalists ever voluntarily walk away from hundreds of trillions of dollars in fossil fuels unless they are forced to do so? And, if not, who will apply the necessary pressure?

Pop-Up during the Little Sprouts program.

https://bgozarks.org/childrens-programming/