Watchers’ eyes track a miles-distant bird. Listeners’ ears hear a whisper a village away. Knowers, extinct for 500 years, possessed telepathic powers straight out of a nightmare. Alesea’s sole extraordinary trait is her musical talent. But when Watchers invade her tiny island on the night of her professional debut, she’s the only one who escapes—unwittingly using the powers of a Knower. Now, it’s up to her to save her people while coming to grips with her dangerous new identity, her pacifist beliefs, and only a traitor to help her. Joanna “Jo” Sisk-Purvis is a writer, musician, and educator from Chapel Hill. Her stories for young people have been published in Cricket Magazine. She is a freelance flutist, music director for several local theatre companies, and a teacher at Carolina Friends School. She lives in the woods with her husband, three children, and far too many animals. THE WATCHERS is her debut novel. Event date: 

It’s 1991. Em moved to New York City for excitement, adventure, and possibility. The Big Apple, though, isn’t quite what she thought it would be. Working as a literary agent’s assistant, she’s down to her last nineteen dollars but has made two close friends: Emily, a firebrand theater director living in a Lower East Side squat, and Lucy, a middle-aged novelist and single mom. Em’s life revolves around these two wildly different women and their vividly disparate yet equally assured views of art and the world. But who is Em, and what does she want to become? It's 2004. Em is now Emily, a successful book editor, happily married and coping with the challenges of a new baby. Though she barely thinks of her early days in the city, the past suddenly comes back to remind her. Her old friend Lucy wrote a posthumous work that needs a publisher, and her ex-friend Emily has reached out and is eager to reconnect. As they did once before, these two women—one dead, one very alive—force Emily to reckon with her decisions, her failures, and what kind of creative life she wants to lead. A sharp yet reflective story of a young woman coming into herself and struggling to find her place, Vintage Contemporaries is a novel about art, parenthood, loyalty, and fighting for a cause—the times we do the right thing, and the times we fail—set in New York City on both side of the millennium. Dan Kois is a writer, editor, and podcaster at Slate, where he’s been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. He’s the author of How to Be a Family, a memoir of parenting around the world, and the co-author (with Isaac Butler) of The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, […]