Join author Thomas Pierce for a reading at Chop Suey Books

The Charlottesville author will read from his acclaimed debut book, ‘The Hall of Small Mammals’ April 9th.

March 26, 2015; 9:56 AM • by Trevor Dickerson

A noted Charlottesville author will stop by Chop Suey Books in Carytown on Thursday, April 9th for a reading from his book, The Hall of Small Mammals.

From Chop Suey Books:

Thomas Pierce will read from his critically acclaimed debut The Hall of Small Mammals Thursday April 9th at 6:00 pm at Chop Suey Books. Pierce has appeared on NPR’s Weekend Edition and his stories have been featured in The New Yorker. A graduate of the University of Virginia creative writing program, born and raised in South Carolina, Pierce lives in Charlottesville, VA with his wife and daughter.

From the opening of the first story in Thomas Pierce’s debut collection HALL OF SMALL MAMMALS (Riverhead Books / January 8, 2015) — “Shirley Temple Three,” the tale of a woman who has to care for the dwarf mammoth her errant son has cloned and resurrected from extinction and then abandoned — you know you are in the hands of a vivid and entrancing storyteller. Those first sentences radiate Pierce’s distinctive voice – his warm humor, the wondrously strange and deeply emotionally true settings and situations he creates, his complex and humane characters. The stories that follow are just as brilliant and unexpected, featuring a physicist in search of a theoretical “daisy” particle; a fossil hunter’s body that goes mysteriously missing; siblings trapped in a pantry searching for ways around their different fears. The people in Pierce’s bewitching stories are aching for connection, that sense of life’s meaning that is found in our fierce and hard, tender and tenacious relationships with one another.

Praise for HALL OF SMALL MAMMALS speaks to Pierce’s ability to strikingly illuminate the workings of our hearts, inspiring a sense of mystery and amazement. As Kevin Wilson says, “This is a fantastic, rewarding book of stories,” with narratives that Brian Kimberling calls “wry, wrenching, and elegant.” And as Megan Mayhew Bergman beautifully states: “Pierce’s collection doesn’t just give us the delicate, dangerous future, but also explores what it means to be a flawed, feeling human living within it” while Ann Beattie agrees, saying that in this book “we read about life lived in an echo chamber of the past that is now moving rocket-like into the future.”