Wednesday, May 28: Maile Meloy, award-winning author originally from Helena, MT, joins us for a reading from her new novel, Do Not Become Alarmed. 7pm.

"Do Not Become Alarmed is the book that every reader longs for: smart and thrilling and impossible to put down. Read it once at breakneck speed to find out what happens next, and then read it slowly to marvel at the perfect prose and the masterwork of a plot. It is an alarmingly good novel." - Ann Patchett

Do Not Become Alarmed is, on the surface, about what happens when two families go on vacation together and the children go missing. The disintegration of the world the families knew--told from the perspectives of the adults and the children--is both riveting and revealing. The parents, accustomed to security and control, turn on one another and blame themselves, while the children discover resources they never knew they possessed. Do Not Become Alarmed is a story about the protective force of innocence, the limits of parental power, and the privileged illusion of safety. It captivates readers with a fast-paced, gripping plot, while also providing a probing and provocative examination of inequality, empathy, and accidents of birth, and the challenge of living up to our own expectations.

Maile Meloy is the author of the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, the short-story collections Half in Love and Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (named one of the 10 Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Book Review), and a bestselling middle-grade trilogy. Her fiction has won the Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Meloy was shortlisted for the UK's Orange Prize and chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.