Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

In conversation with Kimberly King Parsons

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Bursting with bittersweet nostalgia, a funny, poignant, perfectly voiced debut that brilliantly captures what it's like to be a teenage girl.

They're not the most popular freshmen at their Florida prep school, but at least everyone knows their name(s). The Brittanys.

Brittany Rosenberg: drives her golf cart around her subdivision to meet boys.

Brittany Gottlieb: insists you can't lose your virginity if you haven't gotten your period. (She heard it somewhere )

Brittany Jensen: once threw her tampon into a stranger's swimming pool. A brash, bold, unapologetic tomboy. And the greatest person in the whole wide world.

At least as far as the fifth Brittany--our narrator--is concerned. Even within their friend group, she and Jensen are a duo: with their matching JanSport backpacks, Tiffany chokers, and Victoria's Secret push-up bras, they are unstoppable. And now that they're finally growing up, they're going to do everything: dye their hair, attend no-parent parties, try pot . . . maybe even lose their virginities. 2004 is totally going to be their year.

Except Jensen's interests may be diverging from her friends'. And within our narrator's own family--in the lives of her exhausted mother and beloved, genius older brother--life-changing events may be taking shape. Events that only years later, looking back, she has the perspective to see.

BRITTANY ACKERMAN's debut essay collection, The Perpetual Motion Machine, was the winner of Red Hen Press's Nonfiction Award. She has a creative writing MFA from Florida Atlantic University, and has attended the Writing by Writers Methow Valley Workshop and the Mont Blanc Workshop in Chamonix, France, as well as a residency at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods. The Brittanys is her first novel.

KIMBERLY KING PARSONS's debut collection Black Light was longlisted for the National Book Award and the Story Prize, and was a finalist for the Texas First Fiction Award, the Edmund White Award, and the Oregon Book Award. A recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Columbia University, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Parsons lives in Portland, OR, where she is at work on a novel (forthcoming from Knopf) about Texas, motherhood, and LSD.

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The Brittanys: A Virtual Evening with Brittany Ackerman and Kimberly King Parsons