Who would have thought Cincinnati was a breeding ground for dystopian fiction? A few months after local writer Peter Seidel published 2045: A Story of our Future, novelist and poet James Braziel gives us his new speculative fiction, Snakeskin Road. Released by Random House in August, Snakeskin Road is the story of a near-future Southern United States devastated by encroaching deserts, severe weather, mass die-offs and desperate attempts to escape farther north. The new book begins where Braziel’s first novel Birmingham, 35 Miles left off, with a pregnant woman leaving the Southeastern desert in the year 2044 to undertake a dangerous journey to her mother in Chicago. Braziel, a Georgia native, moved north himself to earn an MFA from Bowling Green State University. His short fiction has been published in more than a dozen literary journals and his poetry nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Now an adjunct assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Braziel reads from his work at 7 p.m. at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in the Rookwood Pavilion.
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