New Fiction: A Reading

Jesse Ball is the author of four previous novels, including Silence Once Begun and Samedi the Deafness, and several works of verse, bestiaries, and sketchbooks. He has been named a finalist for the 2015 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and a 2014 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Ball received an NEA creative writing fellowship for 2014 and the 2008 Paris Review Plimpton Prize, and his verse has been included in the Best American Poetry series. In his fifth novel, A Cure for Suicide (Pantheon Books) —a Longlist selection for a 2015 National Book Award in Fiction—a woman "examiner" and a man, her "claimant," move into a small house where the examiner teaches the claimant the most simple functions and monitors his progress, until an encounter at a party raises doubts about everything he has learned. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 2015  

Helen Phillips is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award and the Italo Calvino Prize, among others. Her collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was also a finalist for the McLaughlin-Esstman-Stearns Prize, and her work has been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and appeared in Tin House, Electric Literature, Slice, BOMB, Mississippi Review, and PEN America. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College. The Beautiful Bureaucrat: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co.) is her latest book. In a windowless building in a remote part of town, the newly employed Josephine inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread. As other strange events build to a crescendo, the haunting truth about Josephine's work begins to take shape in her mind, even as something powerful is gathering its own form within her. She realizes that in order to save those she holds most dear, she must penetrate an institution whose tentacles seem to extend to every corner of the city and beyond.

Joshua Cohen has written novels (Witz), short fiction (Four New Messages), and nonfiction for the New York Times, London Review of Books, Bookforum, the Forward, and others. He is a critic for Harper’s Magazine. His latest novel, Book of Numbers (Random House), combines insider tech exposé, leaked memoir-in-progress, international thriller, family drama, sex comedy, and biblical allegory to render the full range of modern experience both online and off. Embodying the Internet in its language, it finds the humanity underlying the virtual.

CANCELLED

Vendela Vida is a founding editor of the Believer magazine and the author of five books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, The Lovers and And Now You Can Go. Her most recent novel is The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty (Ecco). In Vendela Vida’s taut and mesmerizing novel of ideas, a woman travels to Casablanca, Morocco, on mysterious business. While checking into her hotel, the woman is robbed of her wallet and passport—all of her money and identification. Stripped of her identity, she feels burdened by the crime yet strangely liberated by her sudden freedom to be anyone she chooses. A chance encounter with a movie producer leads to a job posing as a stand-in for a well-known film star. The star reels her in deeper, though, and soon she’s inhabiting the actress’s skin off set, too—going deeper into the Casablancan night and further from herself. The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty is part literary mystery, part psychological thriller—an unforgettable novel that explores free will, power, and a woman’s right to choose not her past, perhaps not her present, but certainly her future.