In-Store: SL Carroll: The Art of Conjuring w/ Marin Kosut

"A book as much about undoing as it is about becoming, told with attention, melancholy, and deep yearning." —Ayşegül Savaş
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.
• 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].

The Art of Conjuring is a lyric and whimsical novella that probes the boundaries of femininity, friendship, and the fine line between obsession and inspiration.

“I hear whispers: Have you seen her? The woman who is not a woman, she is a walking museum. Have you seen her wares?”

The narrator of SL Carroll’s radiant debut leads an empty life in a small town until she is employed to catalogue the Museum's collection. She has never seen anyone rewrite their bones the way the Museum has, until they are hardly bones at all. Obsession takes hold and the Museum's display case body inhabits her mind. In an attempt to duplicate the Museum's existence, the narrator secretly begins collecting objects of her own. Can she curate an authentic collection, balancing her own desires with her increasing responsibilities to the Museum?

SL Carroll (she / her) is a Brooklyn-based writer and multimedia artist. Her short story ‘Vanishing Act’ won first prize in swamp pink's Crazyshorts! fiction contest in 2021 and her short film ‘Altar Ego’ was screened in 2022 at Watershed Studios (Galway, Ireland). She is the author of The Art of Conjuring.

Marin Kosut is the author of Art Monster: On the Impossibility of New York and her writing has appeared in Vol.1Brooklyn, Cabinet Magazine, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. She has co-curated shows in artist-run spaces in Brooklyn and Chinatown, and founded Pay Fauxn, a gallery in a pay phone at a Bedford-Stuyvesant bus stop. A MacDowell fellowship recipient, she works as a professor of sociology at SUNY Purchase and lives in Brooklyn.