Join First Light and friends on Tuesday, August 5, to celebrate the book launch of Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut novel, DWELLING.

Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

About the book

A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home—from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again.

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie’s mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners—the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie—parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed—has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel’s DWELLING takes us on a hapless hero’s journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, DWELLING holds a funhouse mirror to our moment—for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

About the author

Emily Hunt Kivel is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, American Short Fiction, New England Review, and Guernica, among other publications. She teaches at St. Edward’s University and Columbia University.

Emily will be joined in conversation by Rachel Monroe, a writer and volunteer firefighter living in Marfa, Texas. Her work has appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2018, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.