In-Store: Tomás Q. Morín: Cat Love w/ Courtney Zoffness

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card. A portion of all ticket proceeds will be donated to the Brooklyn Cat Café!
• 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].

A contemporary dystopian elegy narrated by a cat imprisoned in a Schrödinger’s box, by the prizing-winning poet and memoirist whose writing "cuts to the core with electrifying force" (The Free-Lance Star).

The indelible cat heroine of this unexpected tale recalls her life with “the Mustache,” her beloved owner. Trapped in a one-way mirrored box, displayed in a classroom for people who must contemplate her fate as part of their training to become “Emotional Support Humans,” she weaves a self-soothing paean to the poetry, music, and creature comforts she shared with her Mustache—the best products of a society that has gone off the rails in its violence and intolerance.

The trainees in the room, a motley crew our kitty describes with a novelistic flair of her own, are assigned to consider what they feel about her. They also argue about whether there’s really a cat in there, or are they just being manipulated? Their daily required quizzes are as poignant and witty as our narrator herself. Meanwhile, the mystery of her cat-kidnapping is revealed to us, along with her potential next move on a more spectral plane.

An elegy to freedom, dignity, and connection for all living beings, this slim novel stirs powerful feelings in the reader as it shows us to ourselves from the other side of the mirror.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the memoirs Let Me Count the Ways, winner of the 2023 Vulgar Genius Nonfiction Award, and Where Are You From: Letters to My Son, as well as the poetry collections Machete, Patient Zero, and A Larger Country. He is coeditor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, and a translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He is a fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Courtney Zoffness is the author of SPILT MILK (McSweeney's), and winner of the Sunday Times Short Story Award, the largest international prize for short fiction. She's received fellowships from The Center for Fiction, MacDowell, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Drew University.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Books Are Magic