Nafissa Thompson-Spires — The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford - with Nic Stone — at Union Market

From the author of the multi-award-winning, National Book Award–longlisted, “vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive” (George Saunders) story collection Heads of the Colored People, comes a sly, spry, tall tale of a debut novel about the murder of an infamous moonshiner and the cacophony of true stories a small town can tell about itself.Rich Milford is dead. At last.We find ourselves in Oklahoma, just far enough out of Tulsa, just long enough after the Massacre of 1921. For as long as anyone can remember, the Milfords have led plentiful lives on the backs of the townspeople of Newville. Now, on the ominous brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford is an infamous moonshiner and womanizer and, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He’s dead and buried with no one but his women to mourn him but a question remains: who killed him, and why?Top suspects are his four “wives,” Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light in a volley of competing narratives, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes.In an electric follow-up to her beloved and critically acclaimed debut collection, Nafissa Thompson-Spires once again serves up a brilliant distillation of front-of-mind happenings—think, cults of personality, capitalism run amok in politics, and rampant societal distrust—this time magicked into taut historical fiction structured as a stupefying line dance. In her uniquely powerful, humorous manner, Thompson-Spires takes on the interdependent clash of the traditional and the new-fangled in this genre-bending, gob-smackingly excellent debut.Nafissa Thompson-Spires is the author of Heads of the Colored People, which won the PEN Open Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her collection was longlisted for the National Book Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and several other prizes, including an NAACP Image Award. She is also the recipient of a Whiting Award. She earned a doctorate in English from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of Illinois. With dark humor and covering topics from identity to chronic illness, her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review’s “The Daily,” New York magazine’s “The Cut,” The Root, The White Review, Ploughshares, 400 Souls: A Community History of African America 1619-2019, and The 1619 Project, among other publications. New writing appears in Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Grant. Her young adult debut is forthcoming with Make Me a World. The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford is her debut novel.Thompson-Spires will be joined in conversation with Nic Stone, the author of many novels, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Dear Martin, its New York Times bestselling sequel Dear Justyce, and the final national bestselling installment Dear Manny, a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection and a CBC Kids Top Ten Favorite in the 9th–12th grade category. She also penned the young adult titles Odd One Out, an NPR Best Book and an ALA Rainbow Book Top Ten; Jackpot, the YALSA Quick Pick selection that takes a searing look at economic inequality; and Chaos Theory, a Southern Book Prize finalist and a YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults selection. Her middle-grade novels include Clean Getaway, a New York Times bestseller, and Fast Pitch, a YALSA Quick Pick selection. Nic lives in Atlanta and will continue to write the books she feels are missing.This event is free with first come, first served seating.To request accommodations for this event or to inquire about accessibility please email events@politics-prose.com ideally one week in advance of the event date. We will make an effort to accommodate all requests up until the time of the event.