Tuesday, August 10, 7:00 p.m.

The Surf Guru   BUY NOW

A book of brilliant, adventurous stories from the award-winning Doug Dorst.

In the title story, an old surfing-champion-turned-surfwear-entrepreneur sits on his ocean-front balcony watching a new generation of surfers come of age on the waves, all but one of whom wear wet suits emblazoned with the Surf Guru's name. An acid-tongued, pioneering botanist who has been exiled from the academy composes a series of scurrilous (and hilarious) biographical sketches of his colleagues and rivals, inadvertently telling his own story. A pair of twenty-first-century drifters course through a series of unusual adventures in their dilapidated car, chased west out of one town and into the next, dreaming of hitting the Pacific.

Doug Dorst is the author of Alive in Necropolis, runner- up for the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award, winner of the Emperor Norton Award, and San Francisco's 2009 One City One Book selection. Winner of a 2008 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, Dorst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Epoch, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Politically Inspired. He is also a former Jeopardy champion. A longtime resident of San Francisco, Dorst now lives in Austin, Texas, where he teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University.