Presentation & Signing: Atomic Hearts by Megan Cummins
Join us for a presentation and signing by Megan Cummins, author of ATOMIC HEARTS
Date and time
Location
Asbury Book Cooperative
644A Cookman Avenue Asbury Park, NJ 07712Refund Policy
About this event
- Event lasts 1 hour 30 minutes
Join us for a presentation and signing by Megan Cummins, author of ATOMIC HEARTS.
The $29 event ticket reserves your seat and includes a book! The $5 ticket reserves your seat and will receive a $5 coupon upon arrival at the store that you can use for a purchase that night!
Walk-ins to this event are welcome but space is limited.
Hope to see you in the shop!
ABOUT THE BOOK:
I’d been raised on secrets, I knew they weren’t a good idea.
Sixteen and living in a small Michigan town, Gertie is harboring a secret heavy enough to fracture her closest friendship. She and Cindy have been bonded since birth by the fact their fathers are addicts, and their unsteady home lives are a little easier when they’re together, sprawled on a trampoline with pilfered vodka and dreams of moving to New York.
Everything was changing so fast. I didn’t know what was real.
After an accident involving a bonfire and an aerosol canister sends Gertie to the hospital, she finds herself with nowhere to go but to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to live with her newly sober father. She sees it as a chance to escape the hometown drama she’s caused, but drama finds her all the same: parties without curfews, boys without boundaries, a compromising photo, tragedy back home . . . and her father, once again teetering on the edge of oblivion. Terrified of the consequences of being honest with Cindy, her sole refuge is the fantasy novel she’s writing, a portal to another world and the story of a young girl roaming a strange land, trusting her wits to survive.
I had to become a different, stronger person before I’d even figured out who I was in the first place.
Years later, when ghosts of the past surface, Gertie decides to write again about that explosive summer from the stabler shores of adulthood. Powered by the fierce imagination of her youth, Gertie finally allows herself the grace to tell a version of her narrative that she always hoped would be true.
Written with the feeling and power of a ticking time bomb, Atomic Hearts is an unforgettable story of the relationships that shape us beyond all reason and the ways it might be possible to pull ourselves back from the brink.
AUTHOR BIO:
MEGAN CUMMINS is the author of If the Body Allows It, awarded the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction and longlisted for the Story Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. Her stories and essays have appeared in A Public Space, Guernica, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She edits at Public Books, a magazine of arts, ideas, and scholarship. Atomic Hearts is her debut novel.
BOOK REVIEWS:
“Gertie is a heroine for the ages—I challenge you to find a reader who doesn’t fall in love with her dark humor, her vulnerability, her flaws, or her complicated affection for everyone around her. Atomic Hearts explodes with love and tenderness on every page.”—Maria Kuznetsova, author of Something Unbelievable
“Heartfelt and harrowing . . . Reading Atomic Hearts feels like getting to crawl inside the mind of a quiet best friend.”—Allison Larkin, author of The People We Keep
“A nuclear blast to the emotional core . . . Part teenage summer fling, part family tragedy, Megan Cummins’s debut is the most exquisitely written, bighearted journey into friendship, addiction, and the frustrations that come with parenting our parents. With sentences sharp enough to cut, dialogue that will make you laugh out loud, and a story that will break your heart open again and again, Atomic Hearts is the kind of novel that will send you scrambling for your phone to call your best friend, your mom, your dad, and let them know how much they matter.”—Nick Fuller Googins, author of The Great Transition
ABOUT THE MEDIATOR:
LENA VALENCIA is the author of the short story collection Mystery Lights (Tin House Books /Dead Ink Books), which was longlisted for the Story Prize, named a Best Short Story Collection of 2024 by Electric Literature, and a Best Horror Book of 2024 by Esquire. Her fiction has appeared in BOMB, The Baffler, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Epiphany, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit. Find out more at lenavalencia.com