Readings From New Fiction

Jill Ciment was born in Montreal, Canada. She has received many grants and awards, among them a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and a Guggenheim fellowship. She is a professor at the University of Florida. Vanity Fair calls her latest novel, The Body in Question (Pantheon), “An unnerving, elegant page-turner.” The place: central Florida. The situation: a sensational murder trial, set in a courthouse more Soviet than Le Corbusier; a rich, white teenage girl—a twin—on trial for murdering her toddler brother. Two of the jurors: Hannah, a married fifty-two-year-old former Rolling Stone and Interview Magazine photographer, and Graham, a forty-one-year-old anatomy professor. Both are sequestered along with the other jurors. As the shocking details of the crime are revealed over a string of days and long courtroom hours, and the nights play out in a series of court-financed meals at Outback Steak House and Red Lobster, Hannah and Graham fall into a furtive affair, keeping their oath as jurors never to discuss the trial. During deliberations, the lovers learn that they are on opposing sides of the case. Suddenly they look at one another through an altogether different lens, as things become more complicated . . .

A MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellow, Karen Russell has won twice the National Magazine Award for fiction and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for her first novel, The New York Times bestseller Swamplandia! In the collection Orange World and Other Stories (Penguin Random House), Russell’s comedic genius and mesmerizing storytelling talent are on full display. A young man falls in love with a two thousand-year-old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. Two opportunistic young women fleeing the depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. A new mother desperate to ensure her infant’s safety agrees to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. Even in these peculiar settings, Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. The New York Times Book Review called Russell "[One] of our most original short story writers... […] Russell’s particular gift lies in taking themes that are close to universal and presenting them in stories whose strangeness comes to seem entirely natural, even necessary."

Kristen Arnett is a queer fiction and essay writer. She won the 2017 Coil Book Award for her debut short fiction collection, Felt in the Jaw, and was awarded Ninth Letter's 2015 Literary Award in Fiction. She's a columnist for Literary Hub and her work has either appeared or is forthcoming at North American Review, the Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, Volume 1 Brooklyn, Bennington Review, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Paruh Sehgal from the New York Times calls her debut novel, Mostly Dead Things (Tin House Books), “My song of the summer.” One morning, Jessa-Lynn Morton walks into the family taxidermy shop to find that her father has committed suicide, right there on one of the metal tables. Shocked and grieving, Jessa steps up to manage the failing business, while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the shop to make aggressively lewd art with the taxidermied animals. Her brother Milo withdraws, struggling to function. And Brynn, Milo’s wife―and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with―walks out without a word. As Jessa seeks out less-than-legal ways of generating income, her mother’s art escalates―picture a figure of her dead husband and a stuffed buffalo in an uncomfortably sexual pose―and the Mortons reach a tipping point. For the first time, Jessa has no choice but to learn who these people truly are, and ultimately how she fits alongside them.