Literary Cocktail Hour: Rabbit Hutch with Tess Gunty

Past event
Nov 11, 2022, 5 to 6 PM

The Brattleboro Literary Festival invites you to join us on Friday, November 11, 2022, at 5:00 PM when a Literary Cocktail Hour presents Tess Gunty, and Robin MacArthur to discuss Tess's National Book Award Finalist novel, Rabbit Hutch.

Register at link above.

Set over one sweltering week in July, this is a compelling story of a group of residents in a low-cost housing complex. 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, located in the once bustling Midwestern industrial center of Vacca Vale, Indiana. Blandine isn't like the other residents of her building…she shares her apartment with three teenage boys she neither likes nor understands, all, like her, now aged out of the state foster care system that has repeatedly failed them, all searching for meaning in their lives. 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. Tess will be in conversation with Vermont author Robin MacArthur. Free and open to the public.

"The most promising first novel I've read this year . . . A feeling of genuine crisis . . . propels the narrative through its many twists to the catharsis of its bizarre ending."—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Ambitious . . . Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn't let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine's off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement."—The New Yorker

"Transcendent . . . Compelling and startlingly beautiful . . . Gunty weaves these stories together with skill and subtlety."—Clea Simon, The Boston Globe

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