In-Store: Ramona Ausubel: The Last Animal w/ Helen Phillips

Event guidelines:

• All guests must be vaccinated to attend, and must provide proof of vaccination with either Excelsior Pass or vaccination card in order to enter event.
• All attendees must wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• This event will be livestreamed via YouTube live here: https://youtube.com/live/UuPGHaktgog
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event; 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].

A playful, witty, and resonant novel in which a single mother and her two teen daughters engage in a wild scientific experiment and discover themselves in the process, from the award-winning writer of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty.

Teenage sisters Eve and Vera never imagined their summer vacation would be spent in the Arctic, tagging along on their mother’s scientific expedition. But there’s a lot about their lives lately that hasn’t been going as planned, and truth be told, their single mother might not be so happy either.

Now in Siberia with a bunch of serious biologists, Eve and Vera are just bored enough to cause trouble. Fooling around in the permafrost, they accidentally discover a perfectly preserved, four-thousand-year-old baby mammoth, and things finally start to get interesting. The discovery sets off a surprising chain of events, leading mother and daughters to go rogue, pinging from the slopes of Siberia to the shores of Iceland to an exotic animal farm in Italy, and resulting in the birth of a creature that could change the world—or at least this family.

The Last Animal takes readers on a wild, entertaining, and refreshingly different kind of journey, one that explores the possibilities and perils of the human imagination on a changing planet, what it’s like to be a woman in a field dominated by men, and how a wondrous discovery can best be enjoyed with family. Even teenagers.

Ramona Ausubel is the author of two novels and two story collections, among them Awayland and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, she has been long-listed for the Story Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR’s Selected Shorts, and elsewhere.

Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel The Need, a nominee for the 2019 National Book Award, a New York Times Notable Book of 2019, and a TIME Magazine Top 10 Book of 2019. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the 2017 John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her debut collection, And Yet They Were Happy, was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic and the New York Times, and on Selected Shorts. An associate professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children. Her novel Hum is forthcoming from Marysue Rucci Books at Scribner.

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