Pack It In For Literary Sojourn
09/04/2025 03:30PM ● By Jennie Lay
"Isola" author, Allegra Goodman, is one of the five authors who will travel to Steamboat Springs for Literary Sojourn on Saturday, Sept. 6.
Turn Steamboat Springs’ one-day author festival into a summer-long mission to escape into stories and camp your imagination among wily characters. Literary Sojourn is Steamboat’s 32-year-old author festival, which gathers on Saturday, Sept. 6, this year. The 2025 lineup is full of rock star writers whose books span the highest literary honors. Here’s a suggested path to soak up their words before the big day, and maybe even get a glimmer of what the authors might discuss at the Sojourn.
Karen Russell | “The Antidote”
“The Antidote” is an enticing fantastical Dust Bowl epic. Karen Russell overlays and intertwines the poignant history of the 1935 Black Sunday dust storm and the Great Depression, ripping through the American heartland with a mythical Prairie Witch who roams the rural landscape of Uz and serves as the “vault” for individual memories. It’s a cautionary tale about the costs of omission and forgetting, plus the consequences of half-truths and failing to acknowledge the histories of people, place and planet. The novel is funny and fantastic in all its eerie oddities, and no writer better conjures weird than Karen Russell.
Go deeper with Karen Russell | “Swamplandia!”
Embrace the strange. A family of alligator wrestlers lives in isolation as a self-imagined “native tribe” on a Florida swamp island where they run a campy, threadbare theme park. Their swampy competition arises as a literal and figurative theme park of Hell. The story seems bonkers until you realize what an astute allegory the whole wild, irresistible situation turns out to be. This is the storytelling prowess that put the then-29-year-old author on the well-deserved Pulitzer map and helped her earn a MacArthur genius award.
Rachel Kushner | “Creation Lake”
A bestseller shortlisted for the Booker Prize? Yes please. “Creation Lake” is Rachel Kushner’s espionage novel set in France with flashbacks to California. It features a shadowy, heartless spy-for-hire with questionable character. At any moment she is double-crossing or acting in concert with anarchists, philosophers, Neanderthals or an elusive guru while she’s on a mission to infiltrate a radical farm commune filled with French eco-activists. Her past undercover assignments have proven suspect and her romantic entanglements questionable. Everywhere, the snarky observations are sly, while the philosophical musings and plot each offer readers a welcome comedic slant on the trajectory of civilization.
Go deeper with Rachel Kushner | “The Mars Room”
It’s another Booker finalist. This is the hard-hitting novel that first made me fall in love with
Rachel’s writing and her immense observation powers. “The Mars Room” is a gritty story about
prison life and life’s circumstances that might land you behind bars. Nothing is varnished in the
San Francisco or Central Valley settings, the strip clubs, or the cells of Stanville Prison. Within the
characters lie a certain unveiling of the backbone of mass incarceration – so much so that
readers will pause to question where the text is reportage or fiction.
Adam Haslett | “Mothers and Sons”
This is a novel about family bonds, estrangement and shared secrets that are stored away with widely different perspectives. At the heart of “Mothers and Sons” is a son who is an emotionally shut-down immigration lawyer handling emotionally complex cases for families and individuals whose fates hang by a thread. His mother, by contrast, is a pastor known for compassion and astute listening capacities, who has shed her old life to run an idyllic Vermont retreat center. In the intimate messiness of each character’s story, an evolution of parent-child communication reveals heartbreaking traumas that are too long suppressed, and also opportunities to grow up and heal. Ripe for analysis, Adam Haslett serves up familial emotions that ring complex, sophisticated and authentic.
Go deeper with Adam Haslett | “Union Atlantic”
Step back among his Pulitzer and National Book Award nominations to find Adam’s debut novel, an astute character-driven dismantling of capitalism and the instruments of a global financial crisis as it escalated after 9/11. Greed and malfeasance are ushered through the story by a cast of the Old-World wealthy, newly rich financial cowboys, and questionable treasury powers. All are bound by competing manifestations of ego, power structures, and a lack of accountability that together drive communities and economies off the edge. This story is granular fiction that breathes larger human truths into the rot behind so much ominous financial news.
Allegra Goodman | “Isola”
A young French noblewoman finds herself exiled on an Arctic island in 16th-century New France, aka Canada. Having been orphaned young, the heroine at the center of this story is betrayed by petty, patriarchal and unscrupulous insults at every turn, yet her unfolding survival tale is a testament to love and persistence. She is robbed of wealth and position, but never her dignity.
What makes Allegra Goodman’s seafaring, globe-trotting tale especially astounding is that “Isola” is based on the remarkable true story of real-life Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval. Read it for
the adventure. Read it for the feminist heroine who never gave up.
Go deeper with Allegra Goodman | “Sam”
Allegra is a storyteller with seemingly infinite breadth. Her novels follow incredibly different
trajectories, while her impeccable writing holds steady. “Sam” is a coming-of-age story told
through the agility, explorations, dreams and competitive nature of a young rock climber in
Massachusetts. Ride a tender emotional wave with Sam from age seven to 17 as she navigates family, mad crushes, walking a financial tightrope, existing alongside addiction, personal victories
and heartbreaking disillusionment. Taken together, it’s a riveting portrait of both parenting and
being a girl who climbs literally and metaphorically into becoming a young woman.
Rabih Alameddine | “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)”
Readers should run for Rabih Alameddin’s brand-new book when it launches into the world over Literary Sojourn weekend. Raja and his mother are roommates living in a cramped Beirut apartment. He’s a 63-year-old introspective philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual;” she’s a feisty tour de force with zero respect for boundaries. Over the course of a multi-decade saga, Rabih showers his hilarious wit onto accounts of Raja’s personal and political traumas ranging from the Lebanese civil war to kidnapping and a bout of Stockholm Syndrome,
Covid, the collapse of the Lebanese economy, patronage, migration and the 2020 Beirut port explosion. Revealed in clever and poetic prose, Rabih finds biting humor inside untenable
circumstances while maintaining sufficient reverence for inevitable human quagmire.
Go deeper with Rabih Alameddine | “The Wrong End of the Telescope”
Winner of the PEN Faulkner Award, “The Wrong End of the Telescope” is about an Arab American trans woman’s journey to aid Syrian refugees who wash ashore on a Greek island. The novel brims with humor and cynicism without losing an ounce of humanity. Rabih bestows a delicate and insightful touch upon the deepest tragedies of the refugee crisis while sparing no horrible war or ruthless dictator its due scorn. Told through the narrator’s queer vantage, Rabih transports readers into the lives of displaced people with a different kind of knowing that is both intimate and global.
Turn Steamboat Springs’ one-day author festival into a summer-long mission to escape into stories and camp your imagination among wily characters. Literary Sojourn is Steamboat’s 32-year-old author festival, which gathers on Saturday, Sept. 6, this year. The 2025 lineup is full of rock star writers whose books span the highest literary honors. Here’s a suggested path to soak up their words before the big day, and maybe even get a glimmer of what the authors might discuss at the Sojourn.
Karen Russell | “The Antidote”
“The Antidote” is an enticing fantastical Dust Bowl epic. Karen Russell overlays and intertwines the poignant history of the 1935 Black Sunday dust storm and the Great Depression, ripping through the American heartland with a mythical Prairie Witch who roams the rural landscape of Uz and serves as the “vault” for individual memories. It’s a cautionary tale about the costs of omission and forgetting, plus the consequences of half-truths and failing to acknowledge the histories of people, place and planet. The novel is funny and fantastic in all its eerie oddities, and no writer better conjures weird than Karen Russell.
Go deeper with Karen Russell | “Swamplandia!”
Embrace the strange. A family of alligator wrestlers lives in isolation as a self-imagined “native tribe” on a Florida swamp island where they run a campy, threadbare theme park. Their swampy competition arises as a literal and figurative theme park of Hell. The story seems bonkers until you realize what an astute allegory the whole wild, irresistible situation turns out to be. This is the storytelling prowess that put the then-29-year-old author on the well-deserved Pulitzer map and helped her earn a MacArthur genius award.
Rachel Kushner | “Creation Lake”
A bestseller shortlisted for the Booker Prize? Yes please. “Creation Lake” is Rachel Kushner’s espionage novel set in France with flashbacks to California. It features a shadowy, heartless spy-for-hire with questionable character. At any moment she is double-crossing or acting in concert with anarchists, philosophers, Neanderthals or an elusive guru while she’s on a mission to infiltrate a radical farm commune filled with French eco-activists. Her past undercover assignments have proven suspect and her romantic entanglements questionable. Everywhere, the snarky observations are sly, while the philosophical musings and plot each offer readers a welcome comedic slant on the trajectory of civilization.
Go deeper with Rachel Kushner | “The Mars Room”
It’s another Booker finalist. This is the hard-hitting novel that first made me fall in love with
Rachel’s writing and her immense observation powers. “The Mars Room” is a gritty story about
prison life and life’s circumstances that might land you behind bars. Nothing is varnished in the
San Francisco or Central Valley settings, the strip clubs, or the cells of Stanville Prison. Within the
characters lie a certain unveiling of the backbone of mass incarceration – so much so that
readers will pause to question where the text is reportage or fiction.
Adam Haslett | “Mothers and Sons”
This is a novel about family bonds, estrangement and shared secrets that are stored away with widely different perspectives. At the heart of “Mothers and Sons” is a son who is an emotionally shut-down immigration lawyer handling emotionally complex cases for families and individuals whose fates hang by a thread. His mother, by contrast, is a pastor known for compassion and astute listening capacities, who has shed her old life to run an idyllic Vermont retreat center. In the intimate messiness of each character’s story, an evolution of parent-child communication reveals heartbreaking traumas that are too long suppressed, and also opportunities to grow up and heal. Ripe for analysis, Adam Haslett serves up familial emotions that ring complex, sophisticated and authentic.
Go deeper with Adam Haslett | “Union Atlantic”
Step back among his Pulitzer and National Book Award nominations to find Adam’s debut novel, an astute character-driven dismantling of capitalism and the instruments of a global financial crisis as it escalated after 9/11. Greed and malfeasance are ushered through the story by a cast of the Old-World wealthy, newly rich financial cowboys, and questionable treasury powers. All are bound by competing manifestations of ego, power structures, and a lack of accountability that together drive communities and economies off the edge. This story is granular fiction that breathes larger human truths into the rot behind so much ominous financial news.
Allegra Goodman | “Isola”
A young French noblewoman finds herself exiled on an Arctic island in 16th-century New France, aka Canada. Having been orphaned young, the heroine at the center of this story is betrayed by petty, patriarchal and unscrupulous insults at every turn, yet her unfolding survival tale is a testament to love and persistence. She is robbed of wealth and position, but never her dignity.
What makes Allegra Goodman’s seafaring, globe-trotting tale especially astounding is that “Isola” is based on the remarkable true story of real-life Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval. Read it for
the adventure. Read it for the feminist heroine who never gave up.
Go deeper with Allegra Goodman | “Sam”
Allegra is a storyteller with seemingly infinite breadth. Her novels follow incredibly different
trajectories, while her impeccable writing holds steady. “Sam” is a coming-of-age story told
through the agility, explorations, dreams and competitive nature of a young rock climber in
Massachusetts. Ride a tender emotional wave with Sam from age seven to 17 as she navigates family, mad crushes, walking a financial tightrope, existing alongside addiction, personal victories
and heartbreaking disillusionment. Taken together, it’s a riveting portrait of both parenting and
being a girl who climbs literally and metaphorically into becoming a young woman.
Rabih Alameddine | “The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)”
Readers should run for Rabih Alameddin’s brand-new book when it launches into the world over Literary Sojourn weekend. Raja and his mother are roommates living in a cramped Beirut apartment. He’s a 63-year-old introspective philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual;” she’s a feisty tour de force with zero respect for boundaries. Over the course of a multi-decade saga, Rabih showers his hilarious wit onto accounts of Raja’s personal and political traumas ranging from the Lebanese civil war to kidnapping and a bout of Stockholm Syndrome,
Covid, the collapse of the Lebanese economy, patronage, migration and the 2020 Beirut port explosion. Revealed in clever and poetic prose, Rabih finds biting humor inside untenable
circumstances while maintaining sufficient reverence for inevitable human quagmire.
Go deeper with Rabih Alameddine | “The Wrong End of the Telescope”
Winner of the PEN Faulkner Award, “The Wrong End of the Telescope” is about an Arab American trans woman’s journey to aid Syrian refugees who wash ashore on a Greek island. The novel brims with humor and cynicism without losing an ounce of humanity. Rabih bestows a delicate and insightful touch upon the deepest tragedies of the refugee crisis while sparing no horrible war or ruthless dictator its due scorn. Told through the narrator’s queer vantage, Rabih transports readers into the lives of displaced people with a different kind of knowing that is both intimate and global.