Please join Moon Palace Books to celebrate the release of The Traces by Mairead Small Staid on Monday, November 14th at 7:00pm. There will be a reading from the book followed by a conversation with author Dan Hornsby.

**This is an in-person event. Masks are required in store. Social Distancing is encouraged.**

Mairead Small Staid's debut, The Traces is a work of memoir and criticism that explores the nature of happiness in art, literature, and philosophy, structured around a season spent in Italy and a reading of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

Poised between plummeting depressions, the author considers the intellectual merits of joy and the redeeming promise offered by the beauty, both natural and manmade, that surrounds her. Traveling from Florence to Rome to Capri, The Traces draws on the fields of physics, history, architecture, and cartography, spurred by thinkers from Aristotle and Montaigne to Cesare Pavese and Anne Carson.

Mairead Small Staid is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and Phillips Exeter Academy, where she was the Geoge Bennett Fellow. Her essays have appeared in AGNI, The Believer, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Minnesota.

DANIEL HORNSBY was born in Muncie, Indiana. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, where he received Hopwood Awards for both short fiction and the novel, and an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of a novel, Via Negativa, and his stories and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and Joyland. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.