Author Event: Emily Zhou's "Girlfriends"

Join us on January 18th at 6pm as we host Emily Zhou, who will be reading from and discussing her short story collection, Girlfriends. Joining Emily, we welcome local author Elise Jeanmarie, who will be opening the event with a reading of her work.

About Girlfriends:

In seven light-filled prisms of short stories, Emily Zhou chronicles modern queer life with uncompromising and hilarious lucidity. Attending to the intimacy of Gen Z women’s lives, these stories move from the provinces to the metropolis, from chaotic student accommodation to insecure jobs, from parties to dates to the nights after, from haplessness to some kind of power.

Funny and devastating, like a trans Mary McCarthy, Zhou depicts with shocking precision the choices and shifts through which we work on each other and ourselves. Tender, merciless, and gracious, Girlfriends is a breath of fresh air.

“Girlfriends sounds a loud bell announcing the change of guard: a generational arrival. Here is a writer who can scrap with the likes of Ann Beattie or Richard Ford but attends parties to which those boomers (or for that matter, we millennials) would never get invited.”

—Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby

About the author(s):

Emily Zhou’s first book, Girlfriends, won the 2023 Publishing Triangle's Leslie Feinberg Award and was a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction. She is the “Editrix-At-Large” at LittlePuss Press and a fiction editor at Joyland Magazine. Her shorter writing has appeared in Literary Hub, e-flux journal, Xtra, Club Curran, and a few other places. She lives in New York.

Elise Jeanmarie is a writer living in Providence, RI. She was a finalist for the Ploughshares Emerging Artist Contest and the Montana Prize for Humor. Early drafts of this novel were awarded a fellowship at the GrubStreet Novel Generator and two scholarships at the Craigardan Writers’ Residency in 2023 and 2024. Her short stories have been published in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the upcoming Figuration (anthology from Gnashing Teeth Press), and she was a finalist in the 2024 American Short Fiction Contest. When she’s not writing, she plays in an indie band called Long Stories.

Host or Publisher Symposium Books Staff