$45
Includes a Copy of
Biography of X
Out of stock
Thursday, 7:00 pm EDT April 25, 2024
The Center for Fiction
Members Lounge
Join us for a special evening with Whiting Award-winning writer Catherine Lacey to celebrate the paperback release of Biography of X, her innovative novel that was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New York Times, NPR, the New Yorker, and the Chicago Tribune. The book chronicles the fictional life of X, a notorious artist and writer who kept the details of her past a secret — even from her wife CM. After X falls dead in her office, CM sets out to craft the biography of the woman she loved, immersing herself in a web of secrets and destruction. Set in an alternate timeline in which the South seceded from the rest of the U.S., the novel is a suspenseful and audacious epic about the nature of truth and identity. Lacey’s most ambitious novel to date, Biography of X “pushes contemporary fiction to dizzying heights” (Kirkus) with its inventive fusion of fiction and nonfiction. The intimate setting of The Center for Fiction Members Lounge is the perfect venue for a smaller audience to engage with Lacey, who is “one of the most fearless novelists writing today” (Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times). Lacey’s acclaimed editor Jackson Howard—named one of Harper’s BAZAAR’s 36 Voices of Now and part of Town & Country’s Creative Aristocracy—will join her for an unmissable conversation.
Space for this event will be limited and the price of admission includes a copy of Biography of X. Guests are invited to mingle at a special wine bar before the event.
Featuring
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Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey
Catherine Lacey is the author of the novels Nobody Is Ever Missing, The Answers, and Pew, and the short-story collection Certain American States. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. She has been a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s magazine, the New York Times, the Believer, and elsewhere.
Photo Credit: Willy Somma
Featured Book
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Biography of X
By Catherine Lacey
Published by Picador
When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, CM, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM knows where X was born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, and which finally, in the present day, is being forced into an uneasy reunification.
A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows CM as she traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America’s divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. At last, when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.
Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.