Malaprop’s welcomes Julia Ridley Smith in conversation with Meagan Lucas to discuss Sex Romp Gone Wrong: Stories.
The event is free but registration is required for both in-person and virtual attendance.
Please click here to register for the VIRTUAL event. The link required to attend will be emailed to registrants prior to the event.
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In her debut story collection, Julia Ridley Smith navigates the currents and eddies of desire, sex, love, and relationships.
These twelve highly accomplished stories are witty and accessible, intelligent and thought-provoking. A girls’ week at the beach prompts hot tub drinking, awkward confessions, and a poignant reconsideration of friendship. A caregiver extracts a small repayment from her elderly patient for his long-forgotten role in the demise of her family. A young woman, new to New York City, finds herself in a complex but tacky love affair and reckons with the unfolding plot of her life. In the title story, a woman plots to conceive a second child while at a convention hotel with her husband and teenage daughter, both of whom have other plans. Smith’s stories will beguile and delight readers while at the same time exploring the deep and often difficult ties of family, marriage, and romantic love in modern life.
Sex Romp Gone Wrong is Julia Ridley Smith’s first story collection. Her first book, The Sum of Trifles, is a memoir published by the University of Georgia Press (2021) as a title in their Crux literary nonfiction series. Julia’s short stories and essays have appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Arts and Letters, the Carolina Quarterly, Chelsea, Ecotone, Electric Literature, the Greensboro Review, the New England Review, Southern Cultures, and The Southern Review, among other places. Julia teaches creative writing at UNC Chapel Hill.
Meagan Lucas is the author of the award-winning novel, Songbirds and Stray Dogs and the collection, Here in the Dark. Meagan is Pushcart, Best of the Net, Derringer, and Canadian Crime Writers’ Award of Excellence nominated, and won the 2017 Scythe Prize for Fiction. Her short story “The Monster Beneath” was noted as Distinguished in 2023 Best American Mystery and Suspense and Songbirds and Stray Dogs was North Carolina’s selection for the Library of Congress Center for the Book’s 2022 Route 1 Reads program. She teaches Creative Writing at Robert Morris University and in the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNC-A. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Reckon Review. Born and raised on a small island in Northern Ontario, she now lives in Flat Rock, NC.
This event includes a book signing. If you would like a signed book but can’t attend in person, you may order a signed copy online below. If you would like to have your book personalized, please order online or call the store at least two hours before the start of the event. When ordering online, use the comments field to provide a name for personalization, e.g. “To Carla.” NOTE: We do our best to get books personalized when requested but personalization is not guaranteed.
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