Sanjena Sathian in conversation with Ren Arcamone --Goddess Complex
Schedule
Thu, 17 Apr, 2025 at 07:00 pm
UTC-05:00Location
15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240 | Iowa City, IA
Advertisement
Iowa Writers' Workshop alum Sanjena Sathian will read from her new novel, Goddess Complex, and will be joined in conversation by Ren Arcamone, also a Writers' Workshop alum. Penguin Random House, which published Goddess Complex, describes it as "a darkly funny, vertiginous novel about the dilemmas of procreation, pregnancy, and parenting." Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of the National Book Award finalist All This Could Be Different, praises Goddess Complex as "the most interesting, illuminating, and bold contemporary novel of ideas I’ve read in years. Sanjena Sathian has given us a world that’s split—between India and America, between acid and ache, between the longing to reproduce and the longing to remain inviolate, between comedy and horror—in a way that affords us that rarest of opportunities: a space to truly think." Likewise, Vauhini Vara, author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Immortal King Rao and This is Salvaged, says, "Buckle up, readers: Goddess Complex, an heir to the best of Kafka or Roth in both its savage comic brilliance and its depth of meaning, is the wildest of rides. I can’t remember the last time I read a book that was simultaneously so serious in its ambition—this is a novel, ultimately, about female power and agency—and such a perfectly plotted page-turner. I could not put it down." Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Gold Diggers, which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by the Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It also won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction appears in The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard, and more. She’s written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review, and NewYorker.com, among other outlets. She’s an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at Emory University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In spring 2025, she will serve as the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University. Goddess Complex is her second novel.
Ren Arcamone is an Australian writer. She attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop, and she's a recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Electric Literature, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City.
Advertisement
Where is it happening?
15 S Dubuque St, Iowa City, IA, United States, Iowa 52240Event Location & Nearby Stays:
