Local Author Celebration Series: Theodore Wheeler & Chris Harding Thornton
Castle & Cathedral District presents:
Local Author Celebration Series featuring Theodore Wheeler, author of "The War Begins in Paris" and Chris Harding Thorton, author of "Little Underworld."
Where: Carriage House on the Joslyn Castle & Garden Grounds (3902 Davenport Street, Omaha, Nebraska 68131).
When: Wed, July 17th from 5:30 to 7:00 (Doors open at 5pm).
What: This event is free and open to the public – an all-ages event.
About Theodore Wheeler:
Theodore Wheeler is a writer, bookseller, and college professor from Omaha. He is author of the novels In Our Other Lives and Kings of Broken Things, and the collection of short fiction Bad Faith. His fourth book, The War Begins in Paris, is will be published by Little, Brown & Co. on November 14, 2023.
He has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship, a Nebraska Book Award, the Marianne Russo Award from Key West Literary Seminar, and a fellowship from Akademie Schloss Solitude. Theodore teaches creative writing at Creighton University.
About his book "The War Begins in Paris"
Paris, 1938. Two women meet: Mielle, a shy pacifist and shunned Mennonite who struggles to fit in with the elite cohort of foreign correspondents stationed around the city; the other, Jane, a brash, legendary American journalist, who is soon to become a fascist propagandist. When World War II makes landfall in the City of Lights, Mielle falls under Jane’s spell, growing ever more intoxicated by her glamour, self-possession, and reckless confidence. But as this recklessness devolves into militarism and an utter lack of humanity, Mielle is seized by a series of visions that show her an inescapable truth: Jane Anderson must die, and Mielle must be the one to kill her.
Structured as a series of dispatches filed from around Europe and based on the misadventures of a real journalist-turned-Nazi mouthpiece, The War Begins in Paris is a cat-and-mouse suspense that examines the relentlessness of propaganda, the allure of power, and how far one woman will go for the sake of her morality.
About Chris Harding Thornton:
Chris Harding Thornton, a seventh-generation Nebraskan, is the author of Pickard County Atlas. She has worked as a quality assurance overseer at a condom factory, a jar-lid screwer at a plastics plant, a closer at Burger King, a record store clerk, an all-ages club manager, a PR writer, and a teacher of writing and literature. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. She lives in Wahoo, Nebraska.
About Her Book, Little Underworld:
Omaha, 1930. When ex-cop-turned-PI Jim Beely murders the man who assaulted his fourteen-year-old daughter, the last person he wants to see is local crooked cop Frank Tvrdik. Luckily, Frank isn't interested in the lifeless body in Jim's car. Frank has a proposition: he'll make the dead man disappear if Jim helps take down Elmer Kobb, who is vying for city commissioner and willing to backstab anyone who gets in his way.
Soon, Jim and Frank are sucked into a seedy world of crime and corruption, where no one is safe, and nothing is what it seems. Then Jim is violently attacked and one of his operatives turns up dead within the span of twelve hours, and his search for the truth yields a web of lies and a mounting death toll. As he and Frank are pulled deeper into the city's dark underbelly and its absurd political machinations, Jim begins to question everything he knows about Omaha and his place in it.In her moody, ferocious, and darkly funny follow-up to PIckard County Atlas, a novel Tana French called a "slow-burning beauty of a book," the native Nebraskan Chris Harding Thornton mines Omaha's sordid past, melding fact and fiction into an unforgettable tale of danger and deceit. Little Underworld asks: What does it mean to be good, and what is left for those of us who aren't?
