First Hearings: Sarah Gerard and Colin Winnette
When: Wednesday, October 14, 7 pm
Where: The Wild Detectives, 314 W. 8th Street, (Oak Cliff)
Hosted by: Charles Dee Mitchell

By now I’ve read Binary Star twice, and I’ve become so entwined with it that I’m reluctant to talk about the subject at length. Let me just say that I’ve never read anything like it. — Harry Mathews

I felt a breathless intensity the whole time I read Sarah Gerard’s brilliant Binary Star. I sped through it, dizzy, devastated, loving all of it. — Kate Zambreno, author of Heroines

Two lost souls hurtle through a long dark night where drug store fluorescents light up fashion magazine headlines and the bad flarf of the pharmacy: Hydroxycut, Seroquel, Ativan, Zantrex-3. Gerard’s young lovers rightly revolt against the insane standards of a sick society, but their pursuit of purity—ideological, mental, physical—comes to constitute another kind of impossible demand, all the more dangerous for being self-imposed. Binary Star is merciless and cyclonic, a true and brutal poem of obliteration, an all-American death chant whose chorus is “I want to look at the sky and understand.” —Justin Taylor, author of Flings

A bold, beautiful novel about wanting to disappear and almost succeeding. Sarah Gerard writes about love and loneliness in a new and brilliantly visceral way. — Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation

Allegorized by the phenomena of binary stars, Sarah Gerard’s first novel confronts the symptoms of modern living with beauty and courage. — Simon Van Booy, author of The Illusion of Separateness

Haints Stay is the story of two brothers, Brooke and Sugar, one of whom is pregnant with the other’s child. After the two middling bounty hunters are chased from town due to a bathhouse brawl, they encounter Bird — a boy who mysteriously appears in their camp with no memory and palms as smooth as stones. As the past races to catch up with them, each sets off in pursuit of their own peculiar sense of justice and belonging. An acid Western in the tradition of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, Kelly Reichart’sMeek’s Cutoff, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo, the novel features gunfights, cannibalism, barroom piano, young love, a wagon train, stampedes, and the tenuous rise of the West’s first one-armed gunslinger.

In addition to being called “…the most anticipated American independent novel…” by  Flavorwire , the novel was a Rumpus Book Club pick for May and a #brazosbest pick by Brazos Bookstore for June.