VIRTUAL: Launch for Miah Jeffra / The Violence Almanac

Booksmith and The Bindery are thrilled to host the virtual launch for Miah Jeffra‘s new story collection The Violence Almanac! More to be announced soon, but won’t you save the date and join us?

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.

You can order The Violence Almanac here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.

About the book

In The Violence Almanac, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures.

An ostracized child yearns to be the hero for a rural community threatened by an escaped penitentiary inmate. An ambitious young writer receives mysterious film clips that thrust her and her boyfriend into a spiral of grief. A sex worker attempts to move on after her best friend is murdered by a john. A seismologist struggles to control his rage over a breakup that summons his internal racism. A biographer seeks to capture the truth of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children.

Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, The Violence Almanac vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.

About the author

Miah Jeffra is author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), the chapbook The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic 2017), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2021). Awards include the New Millennium Prize, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, Lambda Literary Fellowship, and 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Outstanding Anthology. Most recent work can be seen in The North American Review, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, DIAGRAM, The Boiler, Litro, Barrelhouse, The Forge and Interim. Miah is a founding editor of Whiting Award-winning queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press. Photo by Sean Mikula.

This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.