In-Store: Brenda Iijima: Shelter is Necessary for Existence w/ Leila Taylor
About this Event
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/J8V7OaScnoI
- 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].
Unsettling and racially charged, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is equal parts psychological thriller and social satire that explores the disquieting qualities of a privileged family’s mundane cultural assumptions.
Sue, her husband, Luke, and their children, Caroline and Wheatley, present as a picture-perfect family living the American dream of ascendancy and affluence in their Brooklyn neighborhood. They purchase a brownstone at auction on a coveted tree-lined street with the intention of renovating it and moving in. At once avoidant and consumed by the renovation, Sue is torn between her aspirations to have what those around her seem to possess—from her therapist, Diana, to her alluring, insufferable neighbor Chantal—and her urge to escape the grip of their influences. Sue’s obsession and paranoia grow while the neighborhood becomes a hotbed of pulsating antagonisms.
It is only after moving in that Sue becomes aware of the mysterious deaths of the brownstone’s former residents, a mother and daughter whose voices echo in the silence. The house begins manifesting disturbing signs, such as wounds that bleed, just as Caroline and Wheatley exhibit their own troubling symptoms. Sue’s nightmares proliferate and a vacuous stupor overcomes the family as they struggle to settle into the rhythms of life in what should be their dream home. When information arises that threatens to devastate her family, Sue must finally confront the explosive charge of personal and social reality once laid bare.
With exacting psychological detail and a trenchant atmosphere, Shelter Is Necessary for Existence is a darkly comic and piercing social critique that examines the troubling territory of awareness, the lengths some go to avoid it, and what must be confronted for change to occur.
Brenda Iijima is the author of Presence published by Georgia Review Books in 2024. She is also the author of numerous volumes of poetry. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and runs a small poetry press.
Leila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history, horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. Author of Sick Houses: Haunted Homes & the Architecture of Dread and Darkly: Black History & America’s Gothic Soul, her work has appeared in the New York Review of Architecture, Lapham’s Quarterly, Repeater Book of the Occult, Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay, and the graphic novel Bitter Root. She’s given talks on the eerie and the esoteric for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Morbid Anatomy, The Collective for Radical Death Studies, and The Occult Humanities Conference. By day, she is Creative Director for Brooklyn Public Library.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 10.89 to USD 20.63
