Boston Book Festival 2019

Maybe you eagerly await each week’s New Yorker to peruse the fiction selection there; or perhaps you haven’t picked up a short story since high school. Either way, you’ll find something new to appreciate in this session showcasing the work of three exciting practitioners of the form. Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s collection White Dancing Elephants focuses largely on the experiences of immigrant women of color in stories that are both visceral and, at times, harrowing; NPR’s review says, “Yes, reading this will be painful, but you will enjoy every page.” Mandeliene Smith’s Rutting Season presents characters on the cusp of sometimes surprising decisions; in a starred Kirkus Review, the collection is praised as “at once powerful and delicate, compassionate and cleareyed.” And Dariel Suarez sets the eleven stories in A Kind of Solitude in his native Cuba after the Soviet revolution; Kenyon Review praises the stories as “full-bodied and confident, and read like the work of a seasoned master.” Hosting this session of short fiction readings is Nakia Hill, educator, facilitator, and author of the poetry collection Water Carrier. Sponsored by Massachusetts Center for the Book.