In-Store: Emily Hunt Kivel: Dwelling w/ Liza St. James

“At once philosophical, goofy, poetic and so, so smart—I would follow Emily Hunt Kivel anywhere.” —Rivka Galchen

About this Event

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/9zijvwZ6nE4
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact ZXZlbnRoZWxwIHwgYm9va3NhcmVtYWdpYyAhIG5ldA==.

A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home—from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again.

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

Emily Hunt Kivel is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, American Short Fiction, New England Review, and Guernica, among other publications. She teaches at St. Edward’s University and Columbia University. Dwelling is her first novel.

Liza St. James is a contributing editor at BOMB, a senior editor of the literary annual NOON, and a writing fellow in the School of Art at Cooper Union. She is a 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction.

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