For a night of propulsive fiction and music with New York Times bestselling author M.L. Rio, don’t miss this San Diego celebration of Hot Wax!
Join us at the Neil Morgan Auditorium, San Diego Central Library @ Joan Λ Irwin Jacobs Common for a compelling, rock-and-roll, ticketed literary event in collaboration with Mysterious Galaxy. Tickets include a copy of the book and seating for up to two guests. Your book order will be available for pickup at Library Shop SD any time after Hot Wax is officially published on September 9th, or at the event on October 6. Proceeds from tickets and books purchased with Library Shop SD support the San Diego Public Library. Meet M.L. Rio, get your copy of Hot Wax signed, and get your photo taken with one of our favorite authors.
About the Speakers
Author M.L. RIO has been an actor, a bookseller, an academic, and a music writer. She holds an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in English literature. She is the author of the internationally bestselling novel If We Were Villains, the USA TODAY bestselling novella Graveyard Shift, and Hot Wax. She never stays in one place for long, but keeps her books, records, and four-legged sidekick in south Philadelphia.
Conversation partner JIM RULAND is an old punk who lives by the sea. He is the LA Times bestselling author of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, which was named a best book of 2022 by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair, and the co-author of Do What You Want with Bad Religion and My Damage with Keith Morris. Jim is an award-winning novelist, a frequent contributor to the LA Times and Razorcake fanzine, and the recipient of fellowships and awards from Bread Loaf, Reader’s Digest, and the NEA. He is a veteran of the US Navy and lives in San Diego, California.
About the Book:
From the cult favorite, bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift comes this new novel — a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that both shattered her childhood and define her.
In 1989, ten-year-old Suzanne idolizes her father’s world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills’ wild ride to glory. But fame has sharp fangs, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning— one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.
The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects a troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she hits the road in search of answers.
Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous ride to hell and back.
“Sensory and visceral, Hot Wax is a propulsive father-daughter story infused with rock and roll down to its very cadences. M. L Rio is a force to be reckoned with.” —Jennifer Egan
