Virtual Event – Brandon Hobson

Magic City Books is thrilled to welcome Brandon Hobson for the virtual book launch event celebrating his new novel, The Removed on February 2, 2021.

Brandon Hobson is the author of When the Dead Sit Talking, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2018, and his new book, The Removed, is steeped in Cherokee myths and history, it is a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago.

Brandon will be joined in conversation by Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah, Most American, and more.

This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the Zoom event visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8iJkm5N7T2q7yQvqfo-BbA.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details about how to join on February 2 at 7:00 CST.

The Removed will be published on February 2. To pre-order a copy visit Magic City Books in person or online: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-removed/174.

About The Removed

In the fifteen years since their teenage son, Ray-Ray, was killed in a police shooting, the Echota family has been suspended in private grief. The mother, Maria, increasingly struggles to manage the onset of Alzheimer’s in her husband, Ernest. Their adult daughter, Sonja, leads a life of solitude, punctuated only by spells of dizzying romantic obsession. And their son, Edgar, fled home long ago, turning to drugs to mute his feelings of alienation.

With the family’s annual bonfire approaching–an occasion marking both the Cherokee National Holiday and Ray-Ray’s death, and a rare moment in which they openly talk about his memory–Maria attempts to call the family together from their physical and emotional distances once more. But as the bonfire draws near, each of them feels a strange blurring of the boundary between normal life and the spirit world. Maria and Ernest take in a foster child who seems to almost miraculously keep Ernest’s mental fog at bay. Sonja becomes dangerously fixated on a man named Vin, despite–or perhaps because of–his ties to tragedy in her lifetime and lifetimes before. And in the wake of a suicide attempt, Edgar finds himself in the mysterious Darkening Land: a place between the living and the dead, where old atrocities echo.

Drawing deeply on Cherokee folklore, The Removed seamlessly blends the real and spiritual to excavate the deep reverberations of trauma–a meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.

Brandon Hobson is the author of the novel Where the Dead Sit Talking, which was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction and winner of the Reading the West Book Award. His other books include Desolation of Avenues Untold and the novella Deep Ellum. His work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize anthology, The Believer, the Paris Review Daily, Conjunctions, NOON, and McSweeney’s, among other places. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at New Mexico State University and teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Hobson is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation Tribe of Oklahoma.

Rilla Askew, born and raised in eastern Oklahoma, is the award-winning author of four novels, The Mercy Seat, Fire in Beulah, Harpsong, and Kind of Kin, the essay collection Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, and a collection of linked stories, Strange Business. She teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.