A coveted time to simply focus on reading!

Bring your favorite book, snack, or drink, and we will have space to spread out and enjoy reading in the company of others who also love to read. All peoples and ages are welcome.

A coveted time to simply focus on reading!

Bring your favorite book, snack, or drink, and we will have space to spread out and enjoy reading in the company of others who also love to read. All peoples and ages are welcome.

With the literary mastery of Samuel Beckett and Thomas Bernhard, award-winning author Lance Olsen presents a lyrical imagining of an artist’s solitary, disembodied life, as dreamlike as it is captivating.

At the end of his life in 1973, Henry Darger’s mind is a series of recollections: of his decades spent working as a custodian mopping floors at various Chicago hospitals; of his nights writing and making hundreds of collages that would never be seen until after his passing; of the man who was once his lover; of his abuse as a child, at the hands of his father and his boarding school instructors.

Informed by the real writings, collages, and other fragments of Darger’s solitary life, An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies is a project of meticulous research and masterful telling, diving deep into the imagination of a man who wasn’t interested in attention, even less in fame, and created for no one save himself—and to save himself.

In an intense, chimeric first-person, Lance Olsen captures the radical interiority of an artist about whom extraordinarily little is known. Paired with the photo collages of visual artist Andi Olsen, this is a literary scavenger hunt for fans of Mark Z. Danielewski, Lidia Yuknavitch, and José Saramago.

Preorder your book here!

A coveted time to simply focus on reading!

Bring your favorite book, snack, or drink, and we will have space to spread out and enjoy reading in the company of others who also love to read. All peoples and ages are welcome.