23 and with Kate Schatz and Lucy Bledsoe at The Bindery, San Francisco, on Nov. 9 at Kepler’s Books in Palo Alto at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Oct. Perks will read from and discuss the book with contemporaries Molly Antopol and Tobias Wolff on Oct. The book is scheduled to be released Oct. As author and professor David Vann noted in a book-jacket blurb, the Houdini story “gains weight from the six million Jews who did not escape.” The influence of Perks’ Jewish background is subtle - yet present. While mostly set in the present, “True Love” includes one story, “King of Chains,” in which a reporter, the grandfather of Sadie and Isaac, interacts with Harry Houdini, in 1915, about the famous escape artist’s visit to the Winchester Mystery House. Through all of Sadie’s escapades, and those of her brother, Isaac, and tangential characters, Perks explores the human yearning for love that is often contradicted by a simultaneous desire to escape.Īs in her previous works, Perks’ imagination is not constrained by a contemporary timeframe.
In a series of interconnected stories, “True Love” recounts the lives and loves of one heroine, Sadie, who runs a funky bookstore in Santa Cruz loves and loses a romantic Chilean student marries mothers travels to Paris and comes home to California. While her previous works - a childhood memoir called “Pagan Time” (2009) and the imaginative novels “We Are Gathered Here,” (1997) and “What Becomes Us” (2016) - were mostly set on the East Coast, her new novel,“True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape,” definitively occupies the California literary landscape. Micah Perks, who grew up on a utopian commune in the wilderness of the Adirondack Mountains and now co-directs the creative writing program at UC Santa Cruz, is such a person. There are people whose lives seem so innately fictional that you wonder if they had any other choice but to become a writer. The books section is supported by a generous donation from Anne Germanacos.
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