Join us for an evening with two fresh and innovative voices in fiction, Ottessa Moshfegh and R.O. Kwon. Both authors’ work touches on the malaise of millennial culture and the need to find stability and purpose in tumultuous times. Ottessa Moshfegh’s work is darkly funny and absurd—The New Yorker writer Jia Tollentino describes her as “easily the most interesting contemporary American writer on the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible.” Her novella McGlue won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose and the Believer Book Award. She is also the author of the short story collection Homesick for Another World. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and Granta, and have earned her a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, the Plimpton Discovery Prize, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Eileen, her first novel, was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Man Booker Prize, and won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. My Year of Rest and Relaxation, her second novel, was a New York Times bestseller. Her third novel, Death in Her Hands is forthcoming in 2020. R.O. Kwon’s first novel The Incendiaries, is a national bestseller and was named one of the best books of 2018 by over forty publications including NPR, The Atlantic, LitHub, and PBS Books. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award for Best First Book, Los Angeles Times First Book Prize, a NCIBA Fiction Prize, and won the Housatonic Book Award. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Buzzfeed, NPR, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States. Please join us for a book signing following the event.
