Jess Walter in conversation with Jim Lynch

Copresented with Elliott Bay Books. 

Folio is excited to invite members and friends to an evening with New York Times best selling author Jess Walter, in conversation with fellow best selling author Jim Lynch.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins and The Cold Millions comes a stunning collection about those moments when everything changes—for the better, for the worse, for the outrageous—as a diverse cast of characters bounces from Italy to Idaho, questioning their roles in life and finding inspiration in the unlikeliest places.

We all live like we’re famous now, curating our social media presences, performing our identities, withholding those parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. In this riveting collection of stories from acclaimed author Jess Walter, a teenage girl tries to live up to the image of her beautiful, missing mother. An elderly couple confronts the fiction writer eavesdropping on their conversation. A son must repeatedly come out to his senile father while looking for a place to care for the old man. A famous actor in recovery has a one-night stand with the world's most surprising film critic. And in the romantic title story, a shy twenty-one-year-old studying Latin in Rome during “the year of my reinvention” finds himself face-to-face with the Italian actress of his adolescent dreams.

Funny, poignant, and redemptive, this collection of short fiction offers a dazzling range of voices, backdrops, and situations. With his signature wit and bighearted approach to the darkest parts of humanity, Walter tackles the modern condition with a timeless touch, once again “solidifying his place in the contemporary canon as one of our most gifted builders of fictional worlds” (Esquire).

Jess Walter Jess Walter is the author of seven novels, one book of nonfiction, one book of short stories and now his latest short story collection, The Angel of Rome. He has twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award (for The Zero and We Live in Water), the Washington State Book Award (The Cold Millions) and was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize (The Zero). His novel Beautiful Ruins was a #1 New York Times bestseller and spent more than a year on the bestseller list. He lives with his wife Anne and children, Brooklyn, Ava and Alec in Spokane, Washington.

The New York Times has called Jim Lynch “such an original and gifted novelist.” He’s the author of four novels, including Before the Wind, which became a bestseller in France, and The Highest Tide, which was a hit in England. Three of his books have been performed on stage by Seattle’s Book-It Theater. His journalism and fiction writing have won regional and national awards. Jim now lives with his wife, Denise, on Vashon Island.