Help celebrate the release of Theodore Wheeler’s debut chapbook (On the River, Down Where They Found Willy Brown) by sharing a few pints with some friends.

The event will feature readings from the chapbook and a DJ set by Darren Keen that mixes period music that was important to the writing of the chapbook with influential contemporary music from Nebraska over the past decade, plus a presentation of photographs and film that were compiled while researching what Omaha was like during World War I.

The story of an immigrant boy who’s caught up in a race riot and lynching, On the River, Down Where They Found Willy Brown is based on events surrounding the Omaha Race Riot of 1919. While trying to find a safe place in the world after being exiled from his home during a global war, Karel Miihlstein is caught in a singular historical moment and one of America’s most tragic episodes. Written in the tradition of the historically-set work of Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, and Colum McCann, On the River, Down Where They Found Willy Brown depicts its characters in deep personal detail and wide social panorama—from a contentious Interrace baseball game on the Fourth of July to the ear-splitting clatter of a race riot—while revealing the folly of human nature in an age of astonishing ambition.

Copies of the chapbook will be for sale ($3), with all proceeds benefiting the Urban League of Nebraska.

http://www.akademie-solitude.de/en/publications/projektiv/on-the-river-down-where-they-found-willy-brown~no3707/

http://www.seclusiasis.com/keenusb/