A perfect crime mystery to read while cozying up under a blanket. It’s funny, it’s provocative, it’s excellent.
This event on January 20 featured author Alexandra Kleeman, bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer, and Kierán Suckling executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
Missed the live event? Watch the recorded event below.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . .
A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?
Praise for Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Named a best book of 2019 by TIME, NPR, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and BookRiot.
PEN America Translation Prize longlist
Warwick Prize for Women in Translation shortlist
“A brilliant literary murder mystery.” —Chicago Tribune
“Tokarczuk is fundamentally a portraitist….It may be worth to ask: Does Tokarczuk transcend Blake?” —National Public Radio
Alexandra Kleeman is the author of Intimations, a short story collection, and the novel You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, which was awarded the 2016 Bard Fiction Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. In 2020, she was awarded the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Conjunctions, and Guernica, among others, and other writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, VOGUE, Tin House, n+1, and The Guardian. Her work has received fellowships and support from Bread Loaf, Djerassi, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Headlands Center for the Arts.
She is an Assistant Professor at the New School and her second novel, Something New Under the Sun, is forthcoming from Hogarth Press. From alexandrakleeman.com.
Jeff VanderMeer‘s NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy has been translated into over 35 languages. The first novel, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and was made into a movie by Paramount in 2018. Recent works include Dead Astronauts, Borne (a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award), The Strange Bird. These novels, set in the Borne universe, are being developed for TV by AMC and continue to explore themes related to the environment, animals, and our future. Forthcoming work include his fantasy romp The Misadventures of Jonathan Lambshead: A Peculiar Peril (FSG Kids) and Hummingbird Salamander (MCD/FSG) which has been optioned by Netflix and Michael Sugar (Anonymous Content).
Called “the weird Thoreau” by The New Yorker, VanderMeer frequently speaks about issues related to climate change and storytelling. From jeffvandermeer.com.
Kierán Suckling is the executive director and founder of the Center for Biological Diversity. He studied computer science and mathematics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Columbia University and Stanford University. He holds degrees in philosophy from the State University of New York at Stonybrook (a master’s) and College of the Holy Cross (a bachelor’s) focused on Greek, continental, linguistic and environmental thought. In addition to overseeing the Center’s conservation, finance, fundraising and administration programs, he writes and lectures on the threats to, preservation of, and relationships between cultural and biological diversity. He also maintains the most comprehensive endangered species research and management database in the United States. From biologicaldiversity.org.
Olga Tokarczuk is one of Poland’s most celebrated and beloved authors, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International Prize, as well as her country’s highest literary honor, the Nike. She is the author of eight novels and two short story collections, and has been translated into more than thirty languages. From penguinrandomhouse.com
XR Writers Rebel - NYC 