In-Store: Caroline Hagood: Goblin Mode w/ Ananda Lima

Event guidelines:

• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured books or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the books will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• The event will be livestreamed for free online here: https://youtube.com/live/CmTZvJBn2Os
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• 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 Caroline Hagood’ s GOBLIN MODE: A SPECULATIVE MEMOIR, the protagonist, who is and is not Caroline Hagood, takes a surreal odyssey through humor, horror, and plague-time Brooklyn.

In a supercharged three-day stretch, she navigates a city full of flashers and parrots who talk to her on subways, makes an ominous visit to a bioluminescent bay in Fajardo, Puerto Rico at Christmastime, mothers two spirited children in an apartment that’ s probably haunted, and lives in a world that may or may not be about to shut down.

This state of goblin mode that she inhabits is metaphorical, said to have taken root since Covid and all the other sociopolitical unrest. But it’ s also very real, in the form of an actual goblin that has been following her around since childhood, daring her to live more fiercely…

Caroline Hagood is an Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing and Publishing and Director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. She is the author of eight books, most recently Weird Girls Writing the Art Monster, Death and Other Speculative Fictions, and Goblin Mode. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Creative Nonfiction, LitHub, the Kenyon Review, the Huffington Post, the Guardian, Salon,and Elle. Her book, Women of Fantasy in Their Own Words: Conversations with Contemporary Authors, edited with Sébastien Doubinsky, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury in December 2025.

Ananda Lima is the author of Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil (Tor Books) and Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Hudson Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Ghosts of Where We Are From, an anthology of dark fiction by Latin American authors, edited by Cynthia Pelayo. She is a Contributing Editor at Poets & Writers and Program Curator at StoryStudio, Chicago. Lima was a mentor at the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program and the inaugural Latinx-in-Publishing WIP Fellow, sponsored by Macmillan Publishers. Craft, her fiction debut, was longlisted for the ALA Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal.

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