Binnie Kirshenbaum - Counting Backwards

New York-based novelist Binnie Kirshenbaum will read from her newest book, Counting Backwards. As Soho Press, the novel's publisher, says, "It begins with hallucinations." Counting Backwards follows the lives of middle-aged married couple Leo and Addie as Addie witnesses Leo's diagnosed Lewy Body dementia progress from amusing hallucinations to devastating loss of control. A New York Times Book Review says, "Counting Backwards is to illness narratives what yellow is to the rainbow...it’s going to do its own thing—brighten up a room, get on your nerves, define the beginning of a new day or the end of an old one," while Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends, praises Counting Backwards as "A novel about the end of life that somehow brims with life, with generosity, humanity, honesty, and, unsurprisingly given the author, bouts of first-class humor. I read all 392 pages in one ten-hour span, unable to stop."

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of eight novels and one short story collection. Her books have been selected as Favorite Books of the Year by The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek Magazine, Vogue and National Public Radio. Her work has been translated into 11 languages. She is a professor of Fiction in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University.