This week’s McNally Jackson Live is a tribute to auspicious debuts. We’ll be celebrating the respective releases of Anna Noyes, Garth Greenwell, and Brian Booker’s respective first books, Goodnight, Beautiful Women, What Belongs to You, and Are You Here For What I’m Here For?
Anna Noyes has published fiction in Vice, Guernica, and other literary journals. She has been awarded the Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship, the James Merrill House Fellowship, and the Lighthouse Works Fellowship. Goodnight, Beautiful Women, a collection of stories about women and girls in Noyes’s native New England, is a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Alexandra Kleeman says, “With terrible grace, these stories bring to light the peril hidden within the mundane, and cast their enthralling shadow on characters that ache like you yourself have ached at your most private moments.”
Brian Booker was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and he currently teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago. His stories have appeared in Conjunctions, Tin House, Vice, and other journals. His collection, The Sleeping Sickness, was a finalist in the Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Are You Here for What I’m Here For? is a collection of short stories that deal with the instability of existence through encounters with illness, natural disaster, and coincidence. Casey Walker says, “In these extraordinary and uncanny stories, anxiety, neurosis, disease, and hallucination overtake his characters and haunt the worlds they inhabit.”
Garth Greenwell has written for The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. His debut novel, What Belongs To You, is an atmospheric narrative of sexual obsession. His previous novella, Mitko, won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Debut Fiction Prize and a Lambda Award. He holds the Richard E. Guthrie Memorial Fellowship at the University of Iowa. "With What Belongs to You, American literature is richer by one masterpiece," says Edmund White.
Our panel will be moderated by Christian Lorentzen, formerly of Harper’s and The London Review of Books, whose current job description at New York Magazine is “literary essayist/observer/provocateur.”
