DATE: Wednesday, June 19
TIME: 7pm – 8:30pm
LOCATION: Open Book Bookstore
Featuring authors Deborah Shapiro and Stephanie Feldman
Join us and meet author Deborah Shapiro as she presents her new novel, The Summer Demands.
Here’s what the critics are saying about this wonderful new novel:
“Shapiro’s prose is elegant, effortless, but it’s her characters that will keep you up late into the night, hoping you can save them.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
“This novel is sultry, shrewd, unnerving, and simply magnetic. I was hooked from beginning to end.” —Rebecca Kauffman, author of The Gunners
“The Summer Demands is a lushly woven tapestry of desire—for intimacy, for danger, for the unctuous past, for the impossible future.” —Aja Gabel, author of The Ensemble
ABOUT THE BOOK:
On the verge of her fortieth birthday and shaken by a recent miscarriage, Emily inherits an abandoned summer camp in Massachusetts. She and her husband move onto the property and make grand plans to revitalize the land. But they soon discover that their inheritance includes an unexpected guest. On a walk through the old campgrounds she once frequented as a girl, Emily finds, living undetected in one of the cabins, a magnetic twenty-two-year-old named Stella.
As the two women begin spending time together—talking and drinking, swimming in the lake, watching seductive French films through long afternoons—Emily finds herself playing at performing various roles relative to Stella: friend, mother, lover. Each encounter they share promises to bring Emily a little closer to an understanding of her own identity, but it also puts her marriage and future at risk. How much does she really know about Stella? Why is Stella here, and what does she want, and what might she take with her, if and when she leaves?
Taking place over a single summer in a landscape that refuses to be tamed, The Summer Demands is a beautiful, quietly startling exploration of the sting of seduction, of unspoken female rage, and of how desire and ambition shift over time. It advances Deborah Shapiro’s place as one of America’s most captivating writers—a novelist who “adroitly conveys women’s complicated intimacy” (The New York Times Book Review).
The author will be joined in this event by her friend and literary colleague, Stephanie Feldman, author of The Angel of Losses. Stephanie will talk to Deborah about her new book, and together these two authors of literary fiction will share stories about their authorial lives, and answer all your questions!
DEBORAH SHAPIRO was born and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Sight Unseen, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Sun in Your Eyes, was selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review, as well as one of the season’s best reads by Harper’s Bazaar, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and Vulture, among other publications. She lives with her husband and son in Chicago.
STEPHANIE FELDMAN is the author of the novel The Angel of Losses (Ecco), a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Crawford Fantasy Award, and finalist for the Mythopoeic Award, and is the co-editor of the multi-genre anthology Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press) Her stories and essays have appeared in Asimov’s, Electric Literature, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Maine Review, The Rumpus, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. She lives outside Philadelphia with her family.
Preregistration is requested. Email lynn@openbookphilly.com to RSVP.