Luncheon with Steven Rowley & Byron Lane at the Strand Bar | May 31st at 11:30 am

{pages} is positively giddy about hosting a celebratory lunch event for our dear friends and fan favorite authors, Steven Rowley (The Guncle) and Byron Lane (A Star Is Bored) both of whom are celebrating publication of new novels on Tuesday, May 30^th. Fun fact: these two charming and talented authors are married to each other.

Ticket includes:

Choice of book (The Celebrants or Big Gay Wedding)
Book talk and signing
A casual, luncheon reception with multiple food stations prepared by the world-famous Strand House team, especially for this event
Killer views, full (no-host) bar and the best darn afternoon in town, you don’t want to miss!

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE YOUR TICKET

Steven Rowley – The Celebrants

A Big Chill for our times, celebrating decades-long friendships and promises—especially to ourselves—by the bestselling and beloved author of The Guncle.

It’s been a minute—or five years—since Jordan Vargas last saw his college friends, and twenty-eight years since their graduation when their adult lives officially began. Now Jordan, Jordy, Naomi, Craig, and Marielle find themselves at the brink of a new decade, with all the responsibilities of adulthood, yet no closer to having their lives figured out. Though not for a lack of trying. Over the years they’ve reunited in Big Sur to honor a decades-old pact to throw each other living “funerals,” celebrations to remind themselves that life is worth living—that their lives mean something, to one another if not to themselves.

But this reunion is different. They’re not gathered as they were to bolster Marielle as her marriage crumbled, to lift Naomi after her parents died, or to intervene when Craig pleaded guilty to art fraud. This time, Jordan is sitting on a secret that will upend their pact.

A deeply honest tribute to the growing pains of selfhood and the people who keep us going, coupled with Steven Rowley’s signature humor and heart, The Celebrants is a moving tale about the false invincibility of youth and the beautiful ways in which friendship helps us celebrate our lives, even amid the deepest challenges of living.

Steven Rowley is the bestselling author of five novels including, Lily and the Octopus, a Washington Post Notable Book; The Editor, an NPR Best Book of the Year; The Guncle, a finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor and Goodreads Choice Awards finalist for Novel of the Year; and The Celebrants. His fiction has been translated in twenty languages. He resides in Palm Springs, California.

Byron Lane – Big Gay Wedding (Henry Holt)

An unashamedly proud, loud, and hilarious novel about a small town that’s forever changed by a big gay wedding, perfect for fans of Red, White & Royal Blue and The Guncle

Two grooms. One mother of a problem.

Barnett Durang has a secret. No, not THAT secret. His widowed mother has long known he’s gay. The secret is Barnett is getting married. At his mother’s farm. In their small Louisiana town. She just doesn’t know it yet.

It’ll be an intimate affair. Just two hundred or so of the most fabulous folks Barnett is shipping in from the “heathen coasts,” as Mom likes to call them, turning her quiet rescue farm for misfit animals into a most unlikely wedding venue.

But there are forces, both within this modern new family and in the town itself, that really don’t want to see this handsome couple march down the aisle. It’ll be the biggest, gayest event in the town’s history if they can pull it off, and after a glitter-filled week, nothing will ever be the same. Big Gay Wedding is an uplifting book about the power of family and the unconditional love of a mother for her son.

Byron Lane is author of A Star Is Bored, hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “wildly funny and irreverent.” He’s a playwright, screenwriter, Emmy Award–winning journalist, and former assistant to actress Carrie Fisher. He’s originally from New Orleans and lives in Palm Springs, California, with his husband, author Steven Rowley, and their rescue dogs, Raindrop and Shirley.