Author festivals offer a chance for personal encounters with writers who toil to build imaginary worlds and complex stories. You don’t have to have read a book before you go hear an author talk about it – they are well trained not to reveal their own spoilers. But reading ahead will surely spawn extra insights (and some really good questions from the audience). Either way, discovering awe for a new author and gleaning inspired reading lists are enticing ways to look at the author fest opportunity.

Steamboat Springs’ literary festival breaks into its fourth decade this summer. Literary Sojourn is Steamboat’s home-grown gathering of authors, celebrating 31 years of bringing rockstar writers to the Yampa Valley on Saturday, Sept. 7. The 2024 lineup is stellar as ever, and the list of published works by these award-winning writers is broad and imaginative. Here’s a guide to get you on the reading trail to Literary Sojourn this summer.

Julia Phillips

“Bear”
Beware. This novel is haunting. In “Bear,” Julia Phillips has written a captivating and suspenseful modern fable about a literal beast and the beast within. There are actual encounters with a grizzly that swims over to tranquil and touristy San Juan Island; and there are the grizzly interior human experiences of family, community and modern life. As the mundane constraints of poverty and terminal caretaking consume the lives of two devoted sisters, it turns out that animalistic instincts are not particular to the bear, and sometimes reader’s sensibilities are suspended as you wonder when the bear is a mirage or a life-threatening encounter. The story is wild from every angle.

Go deeper with Julia Phillips | “Disappearing Earth” is a gripping novel of crime coupled with social and ethnic tensions set on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Strange Russian cities coupled with a rugged remoteness add to both the allure and the dread that pervade this story of two missing indigenous girls and the myriad connections within a tight-knit community. The book was a National Book Award finalist, and it is unforgettable.

Laura Pritchett
“Three Keys”
Laura Pritchett’s second novel of the year, “Three Keys,” launches into the world mid-July, and it’s destined to be one of the summer’s most beloved literary reads. This is a parallel journey, both internal and external, of a newly widowed, middle-aged woman who is an empty nester harboring a fresh sense of abandon and abandonment. Her globetrotting adventure as a heartfelt and hilarious housebreaking criminal is wholly irresistible. Along the way, our lost traveler is found as she explores varied renditions of love and loss – as a mother, a partner, a friend, a sibling, and a human on this climate-imperiled planet. Each encounter is packed with compassion, humility and keen insight, and Laura deftly weaves the whole story together in a wildly frolicking excursion that navigates both the road and the heart.

Go deeper with Laura Pritchett | Laura’s 2024 track record is prolific, having also published this year, “Playing with (Wild) Fire,” a relatable Colorado story told with some truly experimental literary devices (and featured in the Home edition of Steamboat Magazine). Dive further into Laura’s archive with “Stars Go Blue,” her moving, award-winning novel that unravels the complexities of Alzheimer’s disease from alternating perspectives of caretaker and one’s personal effect. “Stars Go Blue” is an intimate and necessary novel about evolving relationships, the changing nature of love, and the Colorado landscapes Laura renders with admirable precision and expertise.

Hanna Pylväinen
“The End of Drum-Time”

Set in the 1850s, “The End of Drum-Time” is a gorgeous work of historical fiction that transpires in Lapland, the Scandinavian tundra. The story explodes at the junction of colonial ambition, religious zealotry and the tenuous survival of native Sámi reindeer herders whose culture, landscape and livelihoods are being squeezed at every side by geopolitics and greed. As Hanna Pylväinen takes us to the roots of a fundamentalist Lutheran faith worming its way into the remote North, she launches her readers into a tremendous forbidden love and a deep passion for a lesser-known indigenous people and their knowledge. This is a timeless story of migration and colonial legacy, race, politics, family and religion. It is also an intimate look inside more than one community’s traditions that you may have never known anything about before you read Hanna’s National Book Award finalist.

Go deeper with Hanna Pylväinen | “We Sinners” was Hanna’s debut novel, told from the connected perspectives of nine children in a deeply religious Finnish-American family who lives in Michigan and follows an obscure religious sect. It’s a perfect contemporary companion to “The End of Drum-Time.”

Ben Fountain
“Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution”

These are connected essays about politics, voters and politicians, circa 2016, written by one of the finest novelists of our time. By contrast to Ben Fountain’s past work, in this book the story isn’t made up, even though the words are crafted so beautifully and precisely that they cry out as literature. Ultimately, Ben’s observations are so piercing and keen that the book becomes an important piece of reportage and analysis that helps document America’s particular moment in history. No one goes unscrutinized. “Beautiful Country Burn Again” is urgent, and it’s current.

Go deeper with Ben Fountain | “Devil Makes Three” is Ben’s new novel, an intense political thriller set in post-Aristide Haiti, and we reviewed it glowingly along with an interview with the author in the Home edition of Steamboat Magazine. Also not to be missed is Ben’s debut novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” which was a National Book Award finalist, a major Hollywood movie, and a damning Catch-22-esque satire of the spectacle of war and how it’s marketed to America.

Andre Dubus III, Master of Ceremonies

“Ghost Dogs”

Andre Dubus’ memoir earns the hardscrabble characters in his novels a deep well of credibility. In “Ghost Dogs,” Andre shares wide-ranging experiences from being a bounty hunter in Mexico, to proving up his manhood for a hard-nosed Louisiana grandfather. He unravels guns in a most personal way, then observes the pitfalls inherent in both poverty and financial prosperity. There is violence and respectful reflection and an accounting of all the things one should take note of in the course a meaningful life. Andre lets us in to his home and his family, and he shares his personal stories with elegant craft and deep humanity.

Go deeper with Andre Dubus III | “Such Kindness” is Andre’s gorgeous novel that cuts at the root of what it means to live with compassion. Told through the flashbacks and contemporary encounters of a carpenter with a once-idyllic family, the story unfolds in the daily toil of a working-class man who now seems to be dangling from the last thread of life’s luck. His falls – first literal, then financial, marital and social – show just how fast calamity can strike anyone living without a safety net. As he wrestles through his demons, there is redemption, beauty and a certain self-possessed reorganization of blame in this heart wrenching and heartwarming story of class, poverty, family and personal transcendence.

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Buy tickets for Bud Werner Library’s single-day author festival and learn more about Literary Sojourn and this year’s featured authors at www.literarysojourn.org.