Please allow me to reveal the cover of my upcoming novel, Grand Rapids. I’m thrilled that Issy Wood gave us permission to place her painting, Car Interior / For Once (2019) because to me it fits the tone, and maybe that should give you indication enough about whether you’ll want to read it.
Again, if you’d like an advanced reader’s copy because you are potentially interested in reviewing/featuring it somewhere, please send me a DM and I’ll pass along your email address to my publisher.
This is my second novel and my fourth book—but who’s counting? I deliberated a lot over the title, because Grand Rapids, Michigan is the name of a place where I have lived and where many of my family members currently live, but about which I would never claim to be a definitive voice—this is not a guide or history or even memoir, but a novel that takes place in a mid-sized Midwestern city, and in fact it doesn’t really matter which.
The words Grand and Rapids together, though, have a nice quality I couldn’t ignore. They have been emptied, as city names are, of their original meanings, and placing them on a work of fiction is an attempt to reacquaint them somewhat with their grandness and rapidness.
The narrator is looking back on her fifteenth summer, a period in anyone’s life I’d describe as both grand, as in striking, and rapid, as in short-lived, and so I’ve forced a double meaning: the city is named for its placement along the vast and churning Grand River—both the opposite of an individual adolescence and a descriptor of the ever-existing idea of adolescence.
You may preorder the novel from a number of booksellers here.
I’m participating in a reading series on April 21st and even though it was just announced, am told that tickets are almost gone. We’re mostly reading other people’s texts, I think, concerning the concept of fashion. I am, at least. It’s hosted by Mikaela Dery and called “Fashion Fiction.” Other readers include Merve Emre, Rhonda Garelick, Rachel Tashjian, Judith Thurman, Avery Trufelman, and Enzo Escober. It’s at Sloane’s, which is the second floor of The Manner on Thompson Street.
I’ll also be reading a short story of my own at an event being planned for April 30th in New York. I’ll let you know about that when I have more info. And there will be readings coming up around my book launch—October 13th is a possible date, also in New York—plus more stuff I’ll tell you about soon. I never expect people to care about readings, but then they sell out, so there you go.