A journey through heartache and entropy in the Anthropocene.
Third Place Books welcomes back Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum for a conversation about her new story collection, Outer Stars. These seven stories confront the search for connection and purpose at a time of environmental, social, and personal erosion. Kirsten will be joined in conversation by poet Brittney Corrigan.
This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
About Outer Stars. . .
In these seven short stories, both realist and speculative, Sundberg Lunstrum considers life in the Anthropocene, an era marked by individual isolation, environmental degradation, and the erosion of our relationships with one another and our land. As they encounter heartbreak and new love, the aches and joys of parenthood, and the grief of bodies in decline, her characters seek connection, identity, and purpose. They ask the questions we all ask: Can we hold on to each other across the fractures that divide us? How do we find belonging in the face of great loss? And is it possible to locate meaning—and even beauty—in our darkest moments? The stories in Outer Stars present the tensions of our age with clarity, but they also leave the reader with hope, affirming the truth of human resilience and compassion.
Praise for Outer Stars. . .
“Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is a master storyteller, and Outer Stars is a mesmerizing, deeply felt collection about the necessity of human connection and the acceptance of those things we can’t change.”
—Andrew Porter, author of The Imagined Life
“In her haunting and beautiful story collection Outer Stars, Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum explores isolation and grief—grief for lost love and children, grief for the life never lived but mourned nonetheless, grief for a changing planet. Her language is elegant, elegiac, prescient, perfectly crafted for the task of describing unbearable losses—both losses behind us and those yet to come. This collection demonstrates why I read everything this author writes.”
—Lori Ostlund, author of Are You Happy?
“Puzzle-box narratives containing secret spaces within secret spaces within secret spaces, some concealed so carefully among the interlocking literary mechanisms that one suspects there are secrets in this text that may not be discovered for centuries to come. This book is an extraordinary achievement.”
—Matthew Baker, author of The Sentence
Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum is the author of the novel Elita (published by TriQuarterly Press/Northwestern University Press in January, 2025) and the story collection Outer Stars, which won the 2025 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (UNT Press) and will be published in November, 2025. Her three previous collections of short fiction are What We Do with the Wreckage, which won the 2017 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction (University of Georgia Press in 2018); Swimming with Strangers (Chronicle Books, 2008); and This Life She’s Chosen (Chronicle Books, 2005). Kirsten’s short fiction has been honored with a PEN/O. Henry Prize, and her stories have appeared widely in journals, among them The Sun, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, One Story, and McSweeney’s. She has held fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, the Jack Straw Writers Program, and the Willa Cather Foundation. Kirsten is a member of the English Department faculty at Seattle’s Bush School and Whitworth University’s Low Residency MFA.
Brittney Corrigan is the author of the poetry collections Daughters, Breaking, Navigation, 40 Weeks, and Solastalgia, a collection of poems about climate change, extinction, and the Anthropocene Age. Brittney is the recipient of a 2025 Oregon Literary Fellowship and a former editor with Airlie Press. She was raised in Colorado and has lived in Portland, Oregon for over three decades, where she is an event planner at her alma mater, Reed College. Brittney’s recent debut short story collection, The Ghost Town Collectives, won the 2023 Osprey Award for Fiction from Middle Creek Publishing. www.brittneycorrigan.com
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