This is a ticketed event and will be held in the courtyard at DIESEL, A Bookstore in Brentwood. Purchasing Properties of Thirst by Marianne Wiggins from DIESEL will reserve a seat at the event. Masks are required to attend.

 

This event will also be live-streamed, register here to watch it online!

Pulitzer-Prize winner Marianne Wiggins returns with Properties of Thirst, a story of land and inheritance, and an examination of a changing American landscape during one of this country’s darkest periods. Set against the backdrop of World War II, Properties of Thirst is an epic story of one family’s unbreakable bond. The Rhodes family is at the center of the story. Rocky Rhodes has spent years fiercely protecting his California ranch from the Los Angeles Water Corporation. He lost his beloved wife, Lou, years earlier and raised their twins, Sunny and Stryker, on the ranch alongside his sister.  With the country on the brink of war, Stryker enlists in the navy, and soon his family is forced to endure another senseless tragedy. Now more than ever, Rocky is determined to hold onto the only home his children have ever known. This goal is further complicated when the US government begins construction on a Japanese internment camp on the edge of the property, and Rocky realizes that the land faces even bigger threats than the LA watermen he’s battled for years. 

 

Marianne Wiggins is the author of eight books of fiction including John Dollar and Evidence of Things Unseen and two short story collections. For her novel Evidence of Things Unseen she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award. She has won a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Heidinger Kafka Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She lives in Los Angeles.

 

 

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles, shortlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and Ucross Foundation. He is the books editor of Alta Journal, and a professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light.