An Evening with Martin Riker & Danielle Dutton

Left Bank Books welcomes St. Louis authors and Dorothy Press co-founders Martin Riker and Danielle Dutton, who will read from and sign their new books, "Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return" and "SPRAWL"!

This event is free and open to the public, but proof of purchase of "Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return" or "SPRAWL" from Left Bank Books will be required to enter the signing line.

When Samuel Johnson dies, he finds himself in the body of the man who killed him, unable to depart this world but determined, at least, to return to the son he left behind. Moving from body to body as each one expires, Samuel’s soul journeys on a comic quest through domestic America, inhabiting a series of lives as stymied, in their ways, as his own. A passive action-novel, a ghost story of the most unexpected sort, Martin Riker’s wholly original debut is about the ways experience is mediated, the unstoppable drive for human connection, and the struggle to be more fully alive in the world.

When Danielle Dutton’s "SPRAWL" first broke upon the world in 2010, critics likened it to collage, a poetics of the suburbs, a literal unpacking of et cetera. This updated edition, with a new afterword by Renee Gladman, reopens the space of its “fierce, careful composition”—as Bookforum wrote—“which changes the ordinary into the wonderful and odd.”