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The Art of the Short Story

The Art of the Short Story: Andrea Barrett on Natural History with Ruth Franklin

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Thursday, 7:00 pm EDT November 17, 2022

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

The Ticket/Voucher option includes a $10 Bookstore voucher, redeemable toward the featured event book on the night of the event. All registrants will receive a link to livestream the event.

To round out our season of fabulous short stories, National Book Award-winning author Andrea Barrett joins The Center for Fiction for a discussion of her new collection, Natural History—named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2022 by Literary Hub and the Millions. In Natural History, Andrea Barrett completes the beautiful arc of intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers, and innovators that she has been weaving through multiple books since her National Book Award-winning collection, Ship Fever. Gorgeously depicting connections between the natural world and the human heart, Barrett’s stories culminate to reveal how the smallest events of the past can have large reverberations across the generations. Writer Ruth Franklin (Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life) will join Barrett in conversation.

Natural History - Eliana Cohen-Orth

Featuring

  • barrettandrea_cbarrygoldstein_2 - Eliana Cohen-Orth

    Andrea Barrett

    Andrea Barrett

    Andrea Barrett is the author of nine previous works of fiction, including the National Book Award-winning Ship Fever and Pulitzer Prize finalist Servants of the Map. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship, as well as a finalist for the Story Prize and a recipient of the Rea Award for the Short Story. Having lived in Rochester, New York, and western Massachusetts, Barrett now resides in the Adirondacks.

    Photo Credit: Barry Goldstein

  • Ruth Franklin

    Ruth Franklin

    Ruth Franklin

    Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at the New Republic. Her book Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (2016) won numerous awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. She is also the author of A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011), which was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Writing. Her criticism and essays appear in many publications, including the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, the New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.