New Fiction with an Edge: A Reading

Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and the novel The Gospel of Anarchy. His hardcover debut Flings: Stories (Harper) is a piercing collection of short fiction that illuminates our struggle to find love, comfort, and identity. From an East Village rooftop to a cabin in Tennessee, from the Florida suburbs to Hong Kong, Taylor covers a vast emotional and geographic landscape while ushering us into an abiding intimacy with his characters, Flings captures the contemporary search for identity, connection, and a place to call home. In their starred review, Publisher’s Weekly writes, “These stories, by turns witty and piercing, form an uncommon portrait of the human heart.”

Marisa Acocella Marchetto is a cartoonist for the New Yorker whose work has appeared in the New York Times; Glamour; and O, The Oprah magazine, among other publications. She is also the author of the graphic memoir Cancer Vixen, named one of Time’s top ten graphic memoirs, and a finalist for the National Cartoonists Society Graphic Novel of the Year.  Ann Tenna: A Novel (Knopf) Is the story of an influential gossip columnist brought face-to-face with her higher self—and a challenge to change her life for the better. Glamorous, superconnected Ann Tenna is the founder of Eyemauler, a New York City-based Web site that’s always the first to dish the most up-to-the-minute dirt on celebrities and ordinary folks alike. Ann has ascended to the zenith of the New York media scene. But as high as her success has taken her, Ann has actually fallen far—very far—from her true self. It takes a near-fatal freak accident on her birthday—April Fool’s Day—and an intervention from her cosmic double in a realm beyond our own to make Ann realize the full cost of the humanity she has lost.