We’re excited to join Guild Literary Complex in welcoming Kathleen Rooney and Jeremy T. Wilson for an event in celebration of their new books From Dust to Stardust and The Quail Wears the Shirt.

About From Dust to Stardust:

Chicago, 1916. Doreen O’Dare is fourteen years old when she hops a Hollywood-bound train with her beloved Irish grandmother. Within a decade, her trademark bob and insouciant charm make her the preeminent movie flapper of the Jazz Age. But her success story masks one of relentless ambition, tragedy, and the secrets of a dangerous marriage.

Her professional life in flux, Doreen trades one dream for another. She pours her wealth and creative energy into a singular achievement: the construction of a one-ton miniature Fairy Castle, the likes of which the world has never seen. So begins Doreen’s public tour to lift the nation’s spirits during the Great Depression—and a personal journey worth remembering.

A sweeping journey from the dawn of the motion picture era through turbulent twentieth-century America, From Dust to Stardust is a breathtaking novel about one determined woman navigating change, challenging the price of fame, and sharing the gift of real magic.

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her latest poetry collection, Where Are the Snows, won the XJ Kennedy Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in September of 2022, and her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, was published by Lake Union Press in September of 2023. She lives in Chicago and teaches at DePaul.

About The Quail Wears the Shirt:

Tuesday night is trivia night, a night for produce market owner Lee Hubbs to swing by the bar with his cop friend, a night to down a few shots and avoid all the folks who’ve mysteriously been turning into quails. It’s a night to kick back and maybe get some action on the side from his employee/girlfriend before heading home to his wife and kids.

But this Tuesday’s different. An argument with the girlfriend, a little unintentional vehicular homicide of an unsuspecting cyclist, and the next thing you know, Lee’s life’s upended like a bushel of rotten peaches. Well, mostly upended. Because when you’re a fine upstanding citizen, and your victim is a quail-human ne’er-do-well who won’t be missed by society, who’s to say what’s right, really?

Jeremy T. Wilson’s The Quail Who Wears the Shirt is a magnificent Southern-fried meditation on guilt and karma, a fantastic and truly memorable work about the lies we tell ourselves and the truths that seep through despite our best efforts, a darkly comedic satire as strange and surreal as an onion pie.

Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the short story collection Adult Teeth and the forthcoming novel The Quail Who Wears the Shirt, both from Tortoise Books. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and his work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast, The Best Small Fictions 2020, and other publications. He teaches creative writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts.

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Tags: Chicago, Doreen O’Dare, Guild Literary Complex presents Kathleen Rooney and Jeremy T. Wilson, Jeremy T. Wilson, Kathleen Rooney, Lee Hubbs, Lower West Side, Pilsen Community Books