Tuesday Apr 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.
A gem of a debut novel about a young mother navigating the instabilities of teaching, parenting, and marriage in the wake of the pandemic.
With deadpan humor and a keen eye for the strangeness of our days, Negative Space follows a week in the life of an English teacher at a New York private school. At home, her two children, increasingly restless, ask constant questions about mortality and find hidden wisdom in the cartoons they watch on television. Her husband tends to his plants and offers occasional counsel between Zoom calls to Hong Kong and Australia. And at school, as she navigates the currents between wealthy, increasingly disconnected students and bewildered faculty, she accidentally witnesses an ambiguous, possibly inappropriate interaction between a teacher and a student.… She feels compelled to say something, but how can she be sure of what she saw?
Precisely rendered and filled with sly observations about our off-kilter days, Negative Space is a witty and resonant portrait of a woman caught between the pressures of home and work, parenting and teaching, what’s normal and what isn’t. Writing with an acute sense of dread and delight, Gillian Linden has crafted a stunning debut that examines what we owe the people who depend on us in a fractured and indifferent world.
About the Author.
Gillian Linden is the author of the short story collection Remember How I Told You I Loved You? She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she won the 2011 Henfield Prize for fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
About the Moderator.
Ed Park is the author of the novels SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS (2023), named a Top Ten Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and a New York Times Notable Book, and PERSONAL DAYS, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, and many other publications. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice, and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. Born in Buffalo, Ed lives in Manhattan with his family. He currently teaches writing at Princeton University.