Austyn's book is already a staff pick, so we are thrilled to welcome her to the store in conversation with Andi!
About the Book:
In the vein of Rachel Cusk, Han Kang, and Clarice Lispector, Hothouse Bloom follows a young woman who renounces her painting career and all her human relationships to become one with her late grandfather’s apple orchard.
Anna arrives at the orchard with the intention to abjure social life, deverbalize her experience, and adjust her consciousness to the rhythms of the trees. She succeeds, for a time, until the arrival of her old friend Jan, nomadic and lively and at work on a book about the painter Charles Burchfield. Alarmed by her isolation and declining health, he tries to get her painting again, while Anna is determined to show him the orchard as she sees it.
As the harvest approaches, the outside world descends in the form of pickers, contractors, neighbors, and pomologists. Anna realizes that the only way back to her idyllic life is to turn a profit. It becomes an obsession, much like her former in the way it consumes her, the way an apple oxidizes, might rot.
Hothouse Bloom is a millennial pastoral, both painterly and critical in its ideas about art, permaculture, subjectivity, and the natural world.
About the Author:
Austyn Wohlers was born in Atlanta in 1996. Her other writing has appeared in The Baffler, The Massachusetts Review, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is also a musician, releasing music alone and with the band Tomato Flower. Hothouse Bloom is her first book.
About the Moderator:
Andi escaped the corporate world and found her dream job of managing an indie bookstore in 2018. She's born and raised in RVA and reads just about anything, with particular favorites being Twisteries, YA, horror, and most any contemporary fiction. When she's not reading she can be found playing pinball and relaxing with her husband, her cats, and a nice cold local beer in her speakeasy home.
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