Author event with R.F. Kuang

Parnassus Books and Vanderbilt University are thrilled to present an evening with R.F. Kuang, in conversation with a special guest, as they discuss Kuang's new book, Katabasis.

This ticketed event take place in Langford Auditorium on Vanderbilt University campus on Sunday, August 31st, at 5:00 p.m. Doors will open at 4:00 p.m. (Please note the change in venue from the Student Life Center to Langford Auditorium)

Tickets:

Each ticket is $38.50 and includes one general admission seat and one signed copy of Katabasis. Books will be pre-signed, and there will be a signing line for personalizations following the event on stage.

Please note: Each attendee can can have only ONE book personalized in the signing line. This can either be the copy of Katabasis included with your ticket, a different title purchased at the event, or a book from home.

No posed photos will be allowed in the signing line. Candid photos are permitted.

Parking and Directions:

we will have parking information soon.

About the book:

Dante's Inferno meets Susanna Clarke's Piranesi in this all-new dark academia fantasy from R. F. Kuang, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Babel and Yellowface, in which two graduate students must put aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor's soul--perhaps at the cost of their own.

Katabasis, noun, Ancient Greek:

The story of a hero's descent to the underworld

Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality: her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world.

That is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault.

Grimes is now in Hell, and she's going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams....

Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the very same conclusion.

With nothing but the tales of Orpheus and Dante to guide them, enough chalk to draw the Pentagrams necessary for their spells, and the burning desire to make all the academic trauma mean anything, they set off across Hell to save a man they don't even like.

But Hell is not like the storybooks say, Magick isn't always the answer, and there's something in Alice and Peter's past that could forge them into the perfect allies...or lead to their doom.

About the Author:

Rebecca F. Kuang is the #1 New York Times and #1 Sunday Times bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, Babel: An Arcane History, and Yellowface. Her work has won the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and British Book Awards. A Marshall Scholar, she has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from Cambridge and an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies from Oxford. She is now pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale, where she studies diaspora, contemporary Sinophone literature, and Asian American literature.