September - October 2024 Selection
Brando Skyhorse
My Name is Iris by PEN/Hemingway Award-winning author Brando Skyhorse, follows Iris (formerly Inés), a second-generation Mexican American striving for a normal life in suburban America with her daughter. Iris is accustomed to straddling the line between her white friends, who dismiss racism, and her Mexican family, who see it everywhere. However, her quest for normalcy is disrupted in a dystopian America that requires citizens to wear identifying wristbands to access services, a requirement Iris cannot meet because they are available only to people with at least one U.S.–born parent.
Iris’s life takes a surreal turn when a wall, visible only to her and her daughter, begins to grow around their home. As she grapples with societal exclusion and increasing desperation, Iris is pushed to the brink in a world that eerily mirrors contemporary issues of identity and belonging. Skyhorse’s narrative is a sharp satire of modern American excess and surveillance, with an atmosphere that grows increasingly Kafkaesque. The novel's biting commentary on racial politics and the immigrant experience resonates deeply, making it a poignant and thought-provoking read.
Brando Skyhorse is an award-winning writer whose debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His memoir, Take This Man, was named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Nonfiction Books of 2014. His latest novel, My Name is Iris, about a Mexican-American has been selected as SFPL's Sept./Oct. 2024 On the Same Page book. Skyhorse, a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center fellowship, teaches English and creative writing at Indiana University Bloomington. He holds degrees from Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop program at UC Irvine.
On, Wed., Oct. 16, 7 p.m. PT, Brando Skyhorse in conversation with Dani Trujillo, fiction storyteller.
Register for Related Events
Book Club: Tue., Oct. 15, 7 p.m., Virtual Library
Author Talk: Brando Skyhorse in convo, Wed., Oct. 16, 7 p.m., Virtual Library
“My Name Is Iris offers a sharp vision of how racism gets imbibed by its victims like a sweet poison. . . . Could there be a more incisive diagnosis of our era? . . . As Skyhorse’s clever satire accelerates into a truly terrifying thriller, the most insidious functions of racism appear illuminated in an eerie new light. . . . Brilliant.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
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