I’m so excited to be featured this coming Saturday at The Twig in San Antonio! Come by the bookshop and see me; I’ll be signing books at the incredible farmers’ market they have there. My event is 11:00-1:00, and the weather is forecast to be gorgeous! Here’s the link to The Twig’s event page for it.
If you’re going to be in the area, come on by and enjoy the very best beignets I’ve ever experienced at this lovely farmers’ market, the super fun and hip Pearl Brewery Complex, and the lovely literary experience that is The Twig Bookshop.
And here are the books they’ll be featuring for me to sign, along with their blurbs. My guess is you can probably order them from The Twig for me to sign while I’m there, too. Please support your independent bookstores, folks — they are the lifeblood of the publishing industry. I can write all the books I want, but without bookstores it’s a lot harder for you to get them.
The Twig is at 306 Pearl Pkwy, Suite 106, San Antonio 78215. See you Saturday. Wheee!
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Elsa’s family grows more unkind by the week. Her boss, a seven-foot-tall rage demon, has control of everything but his anger. And her cat wants to eat her. Things could be better.
One’s Animal Affinity is a sign of maturity and worth. Elsa’s inability to demonstrate hers is becoming a danger. She has no confidence she’ll ever conquer her Plainness and fears both the wolf packs that prowl her neighborhood and being stuck in a life plummeting rapidly from lackluster to perilous. Fortunately, she has a cousin and a co-worker who know her better than she knows herself and can see through to what society won’t.
“It’s not often I get that viscerally emotional on behalf of a fictional character. In a setting of overt fantasy, Angélique Jamail has created some of the most real people I’ve encountered via text in a long time.” – Ari Marmell, author of Hot Lead, Cold Iron and The Widdershins Series
Jamail’s prose is vivid and precise…the implications of this magical world resonate far beyond a seemingly simple story…Elsa’s…story shimmers with allegorical possibilities. It leads one…to reconsider the ways we think about and construct the self, the ways we value and talk about self-realization or self-respect, and to reflect on the ways that it is seemingly both rooted in human and animal nature to fear and distrust difference.” – Misty Urban of Femmeliterate
“A silver vein of irony runs through…fantastic Finis….a witty tale of conformity, prejudice, and transformation, in a world that is disturbing as much for its familiarity as for its strangeness. In a place where everyone is different, Elsa is the wrong kind of different, and that means facing pity, discrimination, danger, and sharp teeth…confront them for yourself; it may just change the way you feel about things…” – Marie Marshall, author of I am not a fish
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Raqia, a teenage girl who immigrated to Texas from Lebanon as a toddler, has felt the subtle pang of loneliness most of her life: she has no siblings, and her widowed father stayed behind when Raqia and her grandmother left Beirut to escape dangerous wolf packs terrorizing the city.
These wolves were not just animals, however. They were also people.
Homecoming is set in a present-day world where one’s Animal Affinity emerges, usually during adolescence, to signal one’s burgeoning into adulthood.
Raqia and her two best friends, Anabelle and Eddie, navigate homecoming at their high school while the threatening undercurrent of wolf packs encroaches around their city. Complicating all of this are two things: first, charismatic Eddie himself is a wolf – though not, he claims, associated with one of the gangs engaging in violent criminal behavior; second, Anabelle’s emotional swings grow more wild as one of the girls begins to evince her Animal Affinity. The balance between this trio – and the friendships which matter in Raqia’s life – are on the cusp of an irrevocable shift.
“A fantastical looking glass on the modern world and the timeless hurdles of growing up.” — Seth Skorkowsky, author of Ashes of Onyx and Dämoren
“With Finis. and now Homecoming, Jamail has created a rich, nuanced world in which the line between human and animal is blurred. The lines demarcating which is which are often used by people to put others in their place. And with a sharp irony, the monstrosity of those with their Animal Affinities is most shown in how they choose to treat their Plain friends and family – that is, by the very human choices they make, not the animal instincts that infuse their characters. These are beautifully written, poignant, and often funny stories, which fans of both the speculative and the literary will enjoy immersing themselves in.” — David Jón Fuller, contributing author to Parallel Prairies, On Spec, Tesseracts
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The Sharp Edges of Water is a book of stories as much as a collection of poems inspired by the rainy concrete plains of Houston and the voluptuous, dynamic terrain of Los Angeles. These earnestly grounded characters are relatable to anyone who has experienced love or loss or joy or transition, but they also sometimes swim in the surreal waters of magic realism.
“For Jamail, loss is the fecund territory complicated by the travails of geographic movement, emotional upheaval, and cultural dissonance and where the poetry sings its best.” — Sarah Cortez, Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials (editor, contributor)
“The poems trace a journey of memories built over time, a demonstration of how the mythic unconscious of our childhood maps onto the fragile desires of our bursting bodies. The poems prick open the hard shell of indifference, or endurance, that thick rind the above-world forms on us with all the wounds and cuts and losses of the sharp edges we stumble through and away from.” — Misty Urban, review at Femmeliterate
“The Sharp Edges of Water is a collection of superbly crafted poems…poems of faith and freeways, of lies and longing. Angélique sees the details of Los Angeles and love, with a necessity of details we locals have forgotten. As the title implies, you might get wet reading them. Wear appropriate clothing.” — Rick Lupert, author of Beautiful Mistakes and God Wrestler, creator of Poetry Super Highway
Sappho's Torque 