If you're looking for the end-all antidote to summer beach reads, Ottessa Moshfegh's EILEEN is here for you.
In the foreboding, wintery, 1960s gothic northeast, a young, moody secretary at a boy's prison graduates from drinking and casual shoplifting to much more sinister affairs. Dark, gritty, cinematic, and one of our favorite debuts of the year.
Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize for her stories in The Paris Review and granted a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford.
You're invited to kick it with Ottessa at Booksmith's low-key answer to book clubs (no assignments). Ticket price includes dinner, drinks, swag, and a signed copy of Eileen, all at a private party with the author. Also on hand will be Gypsy Cheese Co., providing small-batch hand-crafted cheese made 20 minute outside Petaluma. Yum.
Bring an anti-beach read. You'll sit in small groups, talk about your books, switch every 20 minutes or so, and at the end we'll have a big, rowdy, white elephant swap.
$30 / Tickets must be purchased in advance, and they DO sell out.