Events

Highlands Ranch: When Lieutenant Matt Gallagher, while deployed in Iraq, began his blog with the aim of keeping his family and friends apprised of his experiences, he didn’t anticipate that it would resonate far beyond his intended audience. When the extraordinarily popular blog was shut down in June 2008 by the U.S. Army, there were more than twenty-five congressional inquiries regarding the matter, as well as reports through the military grapevine that many high-ranking officials and officers at the Pentagon were disappointed that the blog had been ordered closed. Gallagher will discuss and sign his new book Kaboom: Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War ($24.95 Da Capo). Based on his blog, this book is “at turns hilarious, maddening, and terrifying,” providing “raw and insightful snapshots of a conflict many Americans have lost interest in” (Washington Post). Like Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead, Gallagher’s Kaboom resonates with stoic detachment and timeless insight into a war that we are still trying to understand. Visit Matt Gallagher’s website. Request a signed copy: books@tatteredcover.com

Colfax Avenue: Koren Zailckas, author of the landmark memoir Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, will read from and sign her new book Fury: A Memoir ($25.95 Penguin). In the years following the publication of Smashed, Zailckas was sober and had relegated binge drinking to her past. But a psychological legacy of repression lingered—her sobriety was a loose surface layer atop a hard-packed, unacknowledged rage that wreaked havoc on her emotionally and professionally. When a failed relationship leads her back to her childhood home, she sinks into emotional crisis—writer’s block, depression, anxiety. Only when she begins to apply her research on a book about anger to the turmoil of her own life does she learn what denial has cost her. The result is a blisteringly honest chronicle of the consequences of anger displaced and the balm of anger discovered. Visit Koren Zailckas’s website. Request a signed copy: books@tatteredcover.com