The 2025 Louisiana Book Festival will be held on Saturday, November 1.
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GennaRose Nethercott

Home Featured Authors & Panelists Featured Participant Lineup GennaRose Nethercott

GennaRose Nethercott is the author of a novel, Thistlefoot, and a book-length poem, The Lumberjack’s Dove, which was selected by Louise Glück as a winner of the National Poetry Series. She tours nationally and internationally performing strange tales (sometimes with puppets in tow) and composing poems-to-order on an antique typewriter with her team The Traveling Poetry Emporium. Nethercott helps create the podcast Lore and lives in the woodlands of Vermont, beside an old cemetery. 

 

Schedule

9:00 am to 9:45 am

State Capitol, House Committee Room 5

Books Across America: A Road Trip Documentary

with Mason Engel, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, and GennaRose Nethercott

 

10:00 am to 11:00 am

State Capitol, House Committee Room 1

Dark Fantasy/Horror Fiction

with Victor Dixen, Daniel Kraus, Mary McMyne, and GennaRose Nethercott

 

11:15 am to Noon

Cavalier House Books Tent

Book Signing

 

12:15 pm to 4:00 pm

State Library Lobby

Poetry-To-Order

with Cassandra de Alba and GennaRose Nethercott

Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From the author of the breakout novel Thistlefoot: a collection of dark fairy tales and fractured folklore exploring how our passions can save us—or go monstrously wrong.

“Real magic, real delight, doled out generously in the shape of wistful, ferocious, this-world-but-better stories.”— Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog

The stories in Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart are about the abomination that resides within us all. That churning, clawing, ravenous yearning: the hunger to be held, and seen, and known. And the terror, too: to be loved too well, or not enough, or for long enough. To be laid bare before your sweetheart, to their horror. To be recognized as the monstrous thing you are.

Two teenage girls working at a sinister roadside attraction called the Eternal Staircase explore its secrets—and their own doomed summer love. A zombie rooster plays detective in a missing persons case. A woman moves into a new house with her acclaimed artist boyfriend—and finds her body slowly shifting into something specially constructed to accommodate his needs and whims. A pack of middle schoolers turn to the occult to rid themselves of a hated new classmate. And a pair of outcasts, a vampire and a goat woman, find solace in each other, even as the world's lack of understanding might bring about its own end.

In these lush, strange, beautifully written stories, GennaRose Nethercott explores human longing in all its diamond-dark facets to create a collection that will redefine what you see as a beast, and make you beg to have your heart broken.