Join the Ray Bradbury Center at Centerpoint Brewing Co. for our September Shelf Indulgence Book Club! We will be reading Imagine Your Life Like This and chatting with the author, Sarah Layden.
The Ray Bradbury Center is teaming up with Centerpoint Brewing Co. for our brand-new quarterly book club. Each quarter, we will read a book from a different genre of fiction.

For our September meeting, we’ll be jumping into the land of short stories with local author Sarah Layden’s collection, Imagine Your Life Like This. Come have a beer with us and meet Sarah in person!

Summary:

The characters who inhabit Sarah Layden’s short story collection are on the verge of change—if only they could see themselves and their situations with greater clarity. Caught in the midst of crises, they stumble toward the future without fully understanding their past. Layden’s deft, spare prose sketches worlds and lives with telling details, juggling disparate strands of identity and often revealing the deeper truths in unexpected moments of epiphany.

A bride-to-be puts on her detective hat when her groom goes missing. A woman returns to college after escaping an abusive marriage, only to discover her professor is a fraud. Reunited at a high school reunion, two former classmates completely misinterpret a critical incident from a decade prior. These and other characters find themselves lonely and in limbo, their self-identity is as blurry as the old photographs they cling to with stubborn intensity.

Set mostly in the Midwest and upstate New York, Imagine Your Life Like This captures everyday Americans in all their discontent, misunderstandings, and dogged determination for a better world.

Sarah Layden is an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University, USA. She is the author of Trip Through Your Wires and The Story I Tell Myself About Myself. Her recent nonfiction appears in The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, Salon, and The Millions.

We recommend checking out a copy of the book from your local library or supporting your local bookshop by picking it up in person or online through Bookshop.org—some of our favorite Indy bookstores include Black Worldschoolers, Indy Reads, and Tomorrow.

This event is part of Festival 451indy—a celebration of the humanities— a campaign that will encourage lifelong learning through a variety of public programs, collaborative workshops, performances, and other events throughout Indianapolis.