Tuesday Jul 16, 2024
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY
11201
About the Book.
In a pandemic-hushed city, a young doctor lives a life of insecure attachments: to a distant partner in an untended marriage, to a loaner child who stirs up hurts from the past, to houseplants wilting in a dark apartment on a once-vibrant street.
Through a yearlong fellowship caring for the dying and their families, death is impossible to ignore, and still more endings loom at every turn—endings made worse by wounded, avoidant doctors who don’t know how to let go. But after the sudden loss of a long-estranged father, our unnamed narrator’s work is thrown into painful relief, and we see, under threats large and small, how far we will go to hold on to our lives—no matter how little we live them.
Lyrical and with piercing insight, Our Long Marvelous Dying is a meditation on the twin drives of life and death—and how all of us reckon, day by day, with their ecstatic, inevitable collide.
About the Author.
Anna DeForest is the author of the novel A History of Present Illness and the forthcoming Our Long Marvelous Dying. Anna has an MFA from Brooklyn College and an MD from Columbia University and works as a palliative care physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
About the Moderator.
AMY HEMPEL is the author of five collections of short stories, most recently SING TO IT. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the United States Artists Foundation, and awards including the Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the REA Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award. She has taught at Bennington, Harvard, NYU, Princeton, Stony Brook, and The Michener Center in Austin.