Laird Hunt, Sabina Murray & Sloane Crosley: A Conversation

Laird Hunt is the author of eight novels, a collection of stories, and two book-length translations from French. His reviews and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and others. He teaches in the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. A finalist for the 2021 National Book Award (Fiction), Hunt’s Zorrie: A Novel (Bloomsbury) follows a woman searching for her place in the world – and finding it in rural Indiana. Growing up, Zorrie Underwood’s modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose death orphaned her all over again. Cast off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana, Zorrie drifts westward. She survives on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding work at a radium processing plant. But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, she discovers that her trials have only begun.

Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Philippines and is currently a member of the MFA faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Tales of the New World, A Carnivore’s Inquiry, Forgery, Valiant Gentlemen, and The Caprices, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In The Human Zoo (Grove Press), Filipino American Christina “Ting” Klein travels from New York to Manila to escape her imminent divorce and to start research for a biography of Timicheg, an indigenous Filipino taken to America at the start of the 20th century to be exhibited as part of a “human zoo.” It has been a year since Ting’s last visit and since Procopio “Copo” Gumboc swept the elections and took power as president. Arriving unannounced at her aunt’s aristocratic home, Ting quickly falls into upper-class Manila life. As the days pass, she witnesses modern Filipino society languishing under Gumboc’s terrifying reign. To make her way, she must consider the aristocratic traditions of her extended family while tempering her stance toward a regime her loved ones are struggling to survive. Still, Ting soon finds herself personally confronted by the horrifying realities of Gumboc’s power.

Sloane Crosley is the author of The New York Times bestselling essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake, How Did You Get This Number, and Look Alive Out There, and the bestselling novel The Clasp. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Interview, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair – where she is a contributing editor – the Independent, Black Book, Departures, and The New York Observer. One night in New York City’s Chinatown, a woman is at a work reunion dinner with former colleagues when she excuses herself to buy a pack of cigarettes. On her way back, she runs into a former boyfriend. And then another. And another. Nothing is quite what it seems in a city awash with ghosts of heartbreaks past. What might pass for coincidence becomes something far stranger, and memories swirl and converge in ways both comic and eerie. Equal parts page-turner and poignant portrayal of alienation, Cult Classic: A Novel (MCD) asks: Is it possible to have a happy ending in an age when the past is ever at your fingertips, and sanity is for sale?