from Contributed content on 28 August 2024

Want to discover your new favorite author? Join Keplers for the return of its signature reading series, Story is the Thing, and hear four Bay Area novelists read from their latest titles.

There will be a reception with the authors from 6 p.m., followed by readings, discussion and Q&A at 7 p.m. Buy tickets online.

Selected authors

Katharina Lin is a lawyer and author based in the San Francisco Bay Area and a graduate of Northwestern University and Stanford Law School. You Can’t Stay Here Forever (June 2023) is her debut novel and was named a summer must-read by Good Morning America, People, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

A former science journalist, Claire Osketsky has written for Wired, Technology Review, The New York Times, and other publications. Claire has won the American Society of Journalists and Authors’ Article of the Year award four times. Her novel Chouette (November 2021) was longlisted for the 2022 Pen/Faulkner Prize for Fiction and won the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. She reads with us from her latest, critically acclaimed novel, Poor Deer (January 2024).

Susanne Pari is a novelist, journalist, essayist, book critic and author whose work focuses on stories of displacement and belonging, of identity and assimilation, of trauma and resilience. Her first novel, The Fortune Catcher, has been translated into six languages. She reads with us from her latest novel, In the Time of Our History (January 2023).

Zach Williams is the Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. His story “Trial Run” was one of three that won a 2023 ASME Award for Fiction from The Paris Review. His short story collection Beautiful Days (June 2024) is hot off the press and was one of The New Yorker’s best reads of 2024 so far.