Madeleine Watts presents ELEGY, SOUTHWEST

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Madeleine Watts joins us in Remington to celebrate her new novel Elegy, Southwest, in conversation with Baltimore author Jeannie Vanasco!

ABOUT ELEGY, SOUTHWEST:

A timely and urgent novel following a young married couple on a road trip through the American southwest as they grapple with the breakdown of their relationship in the shadow of environmental collapse, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Sigrid Nunez.

In November 2018, Eloise and Lewis rent a car in Las Vegas and take off on a two-week road trip across the American southwest. While wildfires rage, the married couple make their way through Nevada, California, Arizona, and Utah, tracing the course of the Colorado River, the aquatic artery on which the Southwest depends for survival. Lewis, an artist working for a prominent land art foundation, is grieving the recent death of his mother, while Eloise is an academic researching the past and future of the Colorado River as it threatens to run dry.

Over the course of their trip, Eloise, beginning to suspect she might be pregnant, helplessly witnesses Lewis’s descent as he struggles to find a place for himself in the desert where he never quite felt at home.

Elegy, Southwest is a novel which entwines a tragic love story with an intelligent and profound consideration of the way we now live alongside environmental breakdown; an elegy for lost love and for the landscape that makes us.

Elegy Southwest releases on Tuesday, February 18 and is available for preorder at greedyreads.com!

Madeleine Watts is the author of The Inland Sea, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her novella, Afraid of Waking It was awarded the Griffith Review Novella Prize. Her nonfiction has been published extensively in Harper’s Magazine, The Guardian, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, Literary Hub, and Astra Magazine. She has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and teaches at Columbia and Johns Hopkins Universities.

Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Her third book, A Silent Treatment, will be published by Tin House in fall 2025. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.

Host or Publisher Greedy Reads