Celebrate the paperback release of Alex George's gorgeous The Paris Hours and Emma Straub's wonderful All Adults Here with a very special conversation between three bookseller-authors: Skylark Bookshop's Alex George, Books Are Magic's Emma Straub, and The Raven Book Store's Danny Caine.

One day in the City of Light. One night in search of lost time.

Paris between the wars teems with artists, writers, and musicians, a glittering crucible of genius. But amidst the dazzling creativity of the city’s most famous citizens, four regular people are each searching for something they’ve lost.

Camille was the maid of Marcel Proust, and she has a secret: when she was asked to burn her employer’s notebooks, she saved one for herself. Now she is desperate to find it before her betrayal is revealed. Souren, an Armenian refugee, performs puppet shows for children that are nothing like the fairy tales they expect. Lovesick artist Guillaume is down on his luck and running from a debt he cannot repay—but when Gertrude Stein walks into his studio, he wonders if this is the day everything could change. And Jean-Paul is a journalist who tells other people’s stories, because his own is too painful to tell. When the quartet’s paths finally cross in an unforgettable climax, each discovers if they will find what they are looking for.

Told over the course of a single day in 1927, Alex George's The Paris Hours takes four ordinary people whose stories, told together, are as extraordinary as the glorious city they inhabit.

A native of England, Alex George read law at Oxford University and worked for eight years as a corporate lawyer in London and Paris. He has lived in the Midwest of the United States for the last sixteen years. He is the founder and director of the Unbound Book Festival, and is the owner of Skylark Bookshop, an independent bookstore in downtown Columbia, Missouri. Alex is the author of The Paris Hours, A Good American, and Setting Free the Kites.

Emma Straub is the New York Times-bestselling author of four novels: All Adults Here, The Vacationers, Modern Lovers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her books have been published in twenty countries. She and her husband own Books Are Magic, an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York.

Danny Caine is the author of the poetry collections Continental Breakfast (Mason Jar Press 2019), El Dorado Freddy's (collaboration with Tara Wray, Belt Publishing 2020),  and Flavortown (Harpoon Books, 2020) and the book How to Resist Amazon and Why (Microcosm Publishing, 2021). His poetry has appeared in LitHub, DIAGRAM, Hobart, and Barrelhouse, and his prose has appeared in LitHub and Publishers Weekly. The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association awarded him the 2019 Midwest Bookseller of the Year award. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas where he owns Raven Book Store.

Alex George, Emma Straub and Danny Caine in Conversation