Strange New Worlds: A Reading from Three Novels

In Claire Vaye Watkins’s novel, Gold Fame Citrus, a couple squat in a former starlet’s mansion in a near-future dystopian society where unrelenting drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. In Aaron’s Thier’s Mr. Eternity, two young filmmakers meet an old sailor in Key West, who claims to be 560 years old and calls himself Daniel Defoe. In Ben H. Winters’s Underground Airlines, it’s the present day: smartphones, social networking, and Happy Meals. Only one thing—the Civil War never happened.