Three Novels, a Reading

Julia Phillips’s writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Atlantic, Slate, and The Moscow Times. She studied Russian at Barnard and secured a Fulbright scholarship to visit Russia. One August afternoon, on the shoreline of Kamchatka, a peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls--sisters, eight and eleven--go missing. In the ensuing weeks and months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women. Julia Phillips’s debut novel Disappearing Earth (Knopf) takes us through a year in Kamchatka, visiting in the process the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty--densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and glassy seas. But this is a region as complex as it is alluring, a place where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered. Disappearing Earth reveals the intricate bonds of family and community in a Russia we have not seen before. The New York Times Book Review called Disappearing Earth “A superb debut—brilliant. Daring, nearly flawless. […] Phillips describes the region with a cartographer’s precision and an ethnographer’s clarity, drawing an emblematic cast . . . There will be those eager to designate Disappearing Earth a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it.”

Kimberly King Parsons received her MFA from Columbia University. Her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Ninth Letter, and The Kenyon Review, among others. Black Light: Stories (Vintage) is her first book. Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties writes, “The stories in Black Light are grimy and weird, surprising, utterly lush…I loved every moment of this book.” With raw, poetic ferocity, Kimberly King Parsons exposes desire’s darkest hollows—those hidden places where most of us are afraid to look. In this debut collection of enormously perceptive and brutally unsentimental short stories, Parsons illuminates the ache of first love, the banality of self-loathing, the scourge of addiction, the myth of marriage, and the magic and inevitable disillusionment of childhood. Taking us from hot Texas highways to cold family kitchens, from the freedom of pay-by-the-hour motels to the claustrophobia of private school dorms, these stories erupt off the page with a primal howl—sharp-voiced, acerbic, and wise.

Mary Beth Keane is the author of The Walking People, and Fever. Past honors for her writing include the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" designation, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction writing. Her most recent novel, Ask Again, Yes, debuted at #5 on the New York Times best seller list. Maureen Corrigan calls it, “One of the most unpretentiously profound books I've read in a long time…modestly magnificent.” Francis Gleeson and Brian Stanhope, rookie cops in the NYPD, live next door to each other outside the city. What happens behind closed doors in both houses—the loneliness of Francis’s wife, Lena, and the instability of Brian’s wife, Anne, sets the stage for the explosive events to come. Ask Again, Yes is a deeply affecting exploration of the lifelong friendship and love that blossoms between Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope, born six months apart. One shocking night their loyalties are divided, and their bond will be tested again and again over the next 40 years. Luminous, heartbreaking, and redemptive, Ask Again, Yes reveals the way childhood memories change when viewed from the distance of adulthood—villains lose their menace and those who appeared innocent seem less so.