BRATTLEBORO — On Friday, Nov. 11, at 5 p.m., the Brattleboro Literary Festival is back with another Literary Cocktail Hour, featuring 2022 National Book Award Finalist Tess Gunty with her debut novel, The Rabbit Hutch.
Gunty will be in conversation with Vermont author Robin MacArthur.
This is a compelling story of a group of residents in a low-cost housing complex set over one sweltering week in July: a woman waging a solo campaign against rodents, an online obituary writer, a young mother with a dark secret-neighbors, separated only by the thin walls of a low-cost housing complex. Welcome to the Rabbit Hutch in the once bustling Midwestern industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana.
“Culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a beautiful and funny snapshot of contemporary America, a tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom,” states a news release.
Gunty earned an MFA in creative writing from New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. This, her debut novel, is a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Iowa Review, Joyland, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She was raised in South Bend, Indiana, and lives in Los Angeles.
MacArthur lives and works on the farm where she was born in Vermont. She is the author of Half Wild: Stories, winner of the 2017 PEN/New England Award and the novel Heart Spring Mountain, and she is one-half of the indie-folk duo Red Heart the Ticker.
The cocktail hour is free and open to the public. Register at bit.ly/LitCocktail25.