Tatiana Schlote-Bonne w/ Special Guests, "What Feeds Below"

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Everybody from a small town carries a version of it that nobody back home would recognise. The fields look different once you have left them; the quiet that felt like suffocation starts, at a distance, to feel like something you miss. Schlote-Bonne writes the Midwest from exactly that double position, and her debut is full of the kind of menace that does not announce itself - a basement, a hunger, a family that loves you in a way that costs something. She reads with guests she has not named in advance, which at a store like this usually means other debut writers from the same small-press orbit, the ones who have not been reviewed anywhere yet. That is the actual draw. You are in the room before the consensus forms. Skylight runs these in the back, under the skylight the store is named for, with the shelves rolled aside and the chairs too close together. Admission is free and they want an RSVP. A Wednesday in October is the emptiest night on this city's calendar, and this is forty people choosing to spend it listening to someone's first book out loud.