Announcing the BLR Book Club pick
We’re excited to announce our first pick for the BLR Book Club: Fire Exit, a novel by Morgan Talty. Named a Best Book of the Year by TIME, The New Yorker, ELLE, NPR, and Harper’s Bazaar, Fire Exit is available on BLR’s Bookshop page, where a portion of every purchase goes to support community-building and programming.
Here’s a description:
From the award-winning author of Night of the Living Rez, comes a masterful and unforgettable story of family, legacy, bloodlines, culture and inheritance, and what, if anything, we owe one another.
From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine’s Penobscot Reservation. He caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth’s life―from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there’s something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community. It’s the secret that Elizabeth is his daughter, a secret Charles is no longer willing to keep.
It’s a book that’s as provocative as it is heartbreaking, posing questions about bloodlines, illness, and the stories we carry within our bodies.
The BLR Book Club will begin April 16th. Over the following seven weeks, we’ll read this compelling book together and make space for reflection and conversation. To be a part of the discussion, sign up for the BLR Book Club Facebook Group. We hope you’ll read along!
About the author
Morgan Talty is a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation and the author of the novel Fire Exit (Tin House, 2024) and the national bestselling story collection Night of the Living Rez (Tin House, 2022). His work has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Narrative Magazine, Harvard Review, Oprah Daily, and elsewhere, and has been anthologized in Never Whistle at Night and three consecutive years in The Best American Short Stories.
Talty co-directed, wrote, and acted in the documentary short Belongings, which premiered at Hot Docs 2023 and was named a Vimeo Staff Pick and Short of the Week.
Talty is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Maine, where he teaches fiction, literature, and Indigenous studies. He is also on the faculty at the Stonecoast MFA Program. He serves as Senior Prose Editor for The Massachusetts Review.