Events

  Jessica Anthony’s The Convalescent is the story of a small, bearded man selling meat out of a bus parked next to a stream in suburban Virginia…and also, somehow, the story of 10,000 years of Hungarian history. Anthony, the inaugural winner of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award, makes an unforgettable debut with an unforgettable hero: Rovar Ákos Pfliegman -- unlikely bandit, unloved lover, and historian of the unimportant.   “By the time you come to leave Anthony’s curiously warped world of grumpy mute dwarves, medieval giants and packaged meat, you’ll find yourself wishing that real life was actually this vibrant and colourful.” —Spike Magazine   “Jessica Anthony is a writer possessed of mind-bending talents. Inconceivably, she’s written a novel that’s innocent and wise, grave and hilarious, bleak and hopeful, fast-paced and meditative, heartbreaking and heart healthy, evanescent and concrete.” —Heidi Julavits   “The Convalescent is a fleshy fable spinning in and out of its own enormous, fabulous history. It is lush, cranky, and powered by dark, sweet humor. Mesmerizing. And a lot of fun. I enjoyed it completely.” —Katharine Dunn (author of Geek Love)   Read the Rumpus interview here.   Chris Adrian’s most recent book is A Better Angel. In this inventive collection of stories, he treads the terrain of human suffering -- illness, regret, mourning, sympathy -- in the most unusual ways. A bereaved twin starts a friendship with a homicidal fifth grader in the hope that she can somehow lead him back to his dead brother. A boy tries to contact the spirit of his dead father and finds himself talking to the Devil instead. A ne'er-do-well pediatrician returns home to take care of his dying father, all the while under the scrutiny of an easily-disappointed heavenly agent. With A Better Angel's cast of living and dead characters, at once otherworldly and painfully human, Adrian has created a haunting work of spectral beauty and wit. He is also the author of The Children’s Hospital, first published by McSweeney’s. Hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “one of the most revelatory novels in recent memory . . . Cleverly conceived and executed brilliantly,” The Children’s Hospital is the story of a hospital preserved, afloat, after the Earth is flooded beneath seven miles of water, and a young medical student who finds herself gifted with strange powers and a frightening destiny. Jemma Claflin is a third-year medical student at the unnamed hospital that is the only thing to survive after an apocalyptic storm. Inside the hospital, beds are filled with children with the most rare and complicated childhood diseases -- a sort of new-age Noah’s Ark, a hospital filled with two of each kind of sickness. As Jemma and her fellow doctors attempt to make sense of what has happened to the world, and try to find the meaning of their futures, Jemma becomes a Moses figure, empowered with the mysterious ability to heal the sick by way of a green fire that shoots from her belly. Simultaneously epic and intimate, wildly imaginative and unexpectedly relevant, The Children’s Hospital is a work of stunning scope, mesmerizing detail, and wrenching emotion. A pediatrician at Boston Children's Hospital, he received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a student at Harvard Divinity School.