Tonight, before award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier's scheduled 7pm reading from his latest effort, The View from the Seventh Layer, BookPeople will host its first-ever Literary Cocktail Hour on their third floor. Fancy wines, fine cheeses and an unforgettably brilliant author will be available to all those savvy enough to show up.

Brockmeier first caught our eye in early 2006 with The Brief History of the Dead, his daringly creative look at life after death. Inspired by an African tribal belief, much of the book takes place in the City, a place where the dead carry on living much as they did on Earth as long as someone is still alive to remember them—only when no one is left to remember them do they truly disappear:

At its heart, this is a philosophical novel, in the everyday sense of the word—thought-provoking and contemplative. For one thing, it makes you think about how many people you know. Laura Bird knows thousands of people, whereas Austinist, according to Myspace, knows only 466! More head-scratchingly, Brockmeier plays around the question of mortality popular with self-help gurus: If today was the last day of your life, how would you spend it? One would imagine that the people in the city, having already died once, would be more preoccupied with this question than they are, especially since a second obliteration could come at any time.

[Read our original review]

The Brief History reads with the tension and intrigue of a great thriller or a classic mystery, but Brockmeier's use of near-lyrical language elevates it to the status of true literature with all of the grace and honesty, and none of the pomp.

[Check out an excerpt of his writing at the New Yorker]

On tour now, Brockmeier is already garnering much deserved praise for his new collection of short stories, The View from the Seventh Layer.

The title story follows the mousy Olivia, whose spends her life on a tiny island selling prophylactics. "She would not been surprised," he writes, "to learn that she had become invisible." Olivia classifies people by the books they read, obsessively writes the truth about those she has know in her high school yearbook, and fixates on something called the Entity that hails from the Seventh Layer, a place where nothing can ever truly be lost. She is, in short, loneliness personified.

It takes an author like Brockmeier to craft a book of short stories whose focus seems to be isolation and loneliness, and yet manages to have a yarn entitled "The Human Soul As a Rube Goldberg Device: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story." Written in the requisite second-person, the story provides you with many choices, all of which invariably lead to the same, inevitable conclusion. It's a lonely and hopeless experience we thoroughly enjoyed--and not just for the purely nostalgic effect.

Admission to tonight's inaugural Literary Happy Hour is $5, or free with a copy of the book, and includes all you can eat and drink.