In-Store: Austyn Wohlers: Hothouse Bloom w/ Benjamin Crais

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/qkdXXe2OnRg
• 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 [email protected].

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.

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.

Benjamin Crais is a scholar, critic, and film programmer with a PhD from the Program in Literature at Duke University. His scholarship is published or forthcoming in South Atlantic Quarterly, Mediations, Discourse, and Polygraph. His criticism has appeared in venues including Sidecar (New Left Review), Film Comment, and MUBI Notebook. He is currently at work on a book project on the agrarian question in 20th-century political cinema.

Host or Publisher Books Are Magic