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life going askew. All three books
set us in the present day, in places like Sydney, a Scottish lakeside retreat, and a small midwestern town. We meet characters who are going about their days and feeling, you know, normal levels of ennui. But then come the fires, earthquakes, accidents, and… human hibernation? These books take a literary approach to heavy themes like climate change and survival, but often with a satisfyingly weird bent that propels the stories forward and casts new light on familiar ideas. In other words, all of them would be ideal to absorb yourself in while late-season snowstorms swirl outside.
Caitlin Horrocks’ second story collection,
Life Among the Terranauts, arrives during the darkest period of the pandemic, as winter settles in to our locked-down world, bringing freezing temperatures, grey skies, blizzards and seemingly endless angst-prone nights. It’s a perfect time to read Horrocks, a masterful writer whose prize-winning stories, published in a bucket list of magazines
The New Yorker,
The Paris Review,
Tin House, One Story, and selected for Pushcart and PEN/O.Henry anthologies transport us to strange places.
This Is Not Your City, her 2011 first collection, gave us stories set in Finland, Greece, and the Gulf of Aden, about women faced with complicated circumstances (one has been kidnapped by Somali pirates, but that’s not the point of the story).
Stories of Everyday Strangeness, in the Midwest and Beyond
Caitlin HorrocksCredit.Tyler Steimle
By Noor Qasim
By Caitlin Horrocks
Wouldn’t life be simpler if we could just slumber through it? In “The Sleep,” the opening story of Caitlin Horrocks’s new collection, the residents of a shrinking Midwestern town explore this enticing proposition. Faced with a death in the community and the practical costs of surviving harsh winters, the residents of Bounty decide to try hibernation. “Why stay?” ask nosy reporters. The residents answer: “Our people had moved to Bounty because the land was there and it was empty, and now all we had was the emptiness and one another.” Bounty’s decline has been severe but gradual; residents hardly notice it until the town’s dilapidated buildings are shown on television. Hibernation is their strange yet dignified response.
Kenyon Review Reading Series 2020-21
All events sponsored in whole or in part by the
Kenyon Review, the Kenyon College English Department, GLCA New Writers Award, Ohio Arts Council, and the
KR Associates Program.
All of this year’s Kenyon Review Reading Series events are VIRTUAL. See below for links to our scheduled events, and please visit this page again soon as we are building a rich lineup for this fall. You can purchase books written by our virtual reading series authors in our KR Bookshop. We hope you’ll join us.
Although these readings are free and open to the public, we hope you will consider making a donation. With your support, we’ll continue to provide programming that celebrates the most exciting voices in literature from ever more diverse, ever more talented communities of authors.