Olivie Blake, in conversation with Amy Tintera, discusses & signs Dreamland

Most people who love these books have only ever loved them alone. At 1am, thumb on a screen, three chapters past the point where sleep was still an option, with nobody in the house who would understand why you are crying about a fictional academic. The fandom lives online because that is where it was born, and there is a specific hunger that builds in a person who has spent years talking about a story only to strangers with usernames. Then you walk into a room in Pasadena on a Tuesday night and forty of those strangers have faces. They brought their annotated copies. The tabs are color-coded, and somebody two rows up has the same tab system you thought you invented. The oldest independent bookstore in Southern California has been putting authors in front of readers here since 1894, which means the shelves behind the folding chairs have watched a hundred and thirty years of exactly this: people finding out their private thing is a shared thing. Doors at 7:00pm on Tuesday, August 11. Bring the copy with the tabs in it.