BAD HOUSES and STILL LIFE: A Conversation with JOHN ELIZABETH STINZI and KATHERINE PACKERT BURKE
Schedule
Thu Nov 14 2024 at 06:00 pm
UTC-06:00Location
2717 Atwood Avenue, Madison, WI, United States, Wisconsin 53704 | Madison, WI
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A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome authors John Elizabeth Stinzi and Katherine Packert Burke in celebration of their new releases, Bad Houses: Stories and Still Life: A Novel, respectively. This is an in person event at A Room of One's Own.
About the Books
Bad Houses: Stories
From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.
In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humorous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.
Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.
Featuring Stintzi's own expressive ink illustrations, Bad Houses is a book that feels like it was penned by a trans Alice Munro mixed with a bubblier Franz Kafka. Enter if you dare.
Still Life: A Novel
A profound and piercing tribute to messy webs of queer friendship and to what is left behind in transition. Still Life traces the lives of three friends, authentic and evolving, loving and cruel, here and gone, to craft a tableau of modern womanhood.
Everything in Edith’s life is approaching disaster. Her writing career is stagnant. Her love life is a mess. Her ex, Tessa, is marrying a man. Her teeth are rotting in her skull. And her best friend, Val, is dead.
Still Life volleys between the present and recent past, chronicling the lives of three women—one cis, two trans, all forever entwined. Edith was a bumbling “boy” pre-transition, in love with Tessa, enamored by Val, and drowning in Boston. She and Tessa called each other Joni and Joan, an homage to the musical backdrop of their fledgling adulthood. When Edith decides to leave behind the East Coast for graduate school, she begins a yearslong journey away from the person she loves most and toward a hazy new understanding of who she will become.
John Elizabeth Stintzi is the author of the novels My Volcano and Vanishing Monuments (finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award), the story collection Bad Houses, and the poetry collection Junebat. They are the recipient of the 2019 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award and the Sator New Works Award, and their writing has appeared in Ploughshares, The Malahat Review, Kenyon Review, and others.
Katherine Packert Burke is a graduate of the Clarion Writers' Workshop in San Diego and the MFA program at the University of Alabama. She lives in Minneapolis
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Where is it happening?
2717 Atwood Avenue, Madison, WI, United States, Wisconsin 53704Event Location & Nearby Stays:
