An Evening with Brittany Newell, author of Soft Core

TelHiLit proudly welcomes local author Brittany Newell in celebration of her book Soft Core!

A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.

Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers’ secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it—until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace.

Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves—through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . .

A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.

Brittany Newell is a writer and performer living in San Francisco. Her debut novel Oola was published in 2017 at the age of 21 by Henry Holt and HarperCollins. It was translated into German by btb, a division of Random House, in January 2020 and published as Ein Sommer in Big Sur. From 2017-18 she wrote a regular column on gender and sexuality for Dazed Digital. You can find her written work in Granta, N+1, The New York Times, Joyland and Playgirl. In 2021 she was a recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission's Individual Artist grant for artists serving under-represented communities. Her second novel Soft Core will be published by FSG in February 2025 in the US, 4th Estate in the UK, and Fayard in France. She and her wife Maria Silk run a monthly drag and dance party called Angels at Aunt Charlie's Lounge, one of San Francisco's oldest queer bars.

Erin Carlson is culture and entertainment journalist, and the author of three Hollywood history books: I’ll Have What She’s Having: How Nora Ephron’s Three Iconic Films Saved the Romantic Comedy; the biography Queen Meryl, and the upcoming No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of A League of Their Own. Her work appears in many publications, including Vanity Fair, Town and Country and her Substack newsletter,You’ve Got Mail.

Kate Folk is an author, screenwriter, and educator based in San Francisco. Her debut novel, Sky Daddy, is forthcoming from Random House in 2025. Her story collection, Out There, was a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. In 2024, her feature screenplay adaptation of Out There was chosen for the annual Black List. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR.

Event Venue

Telegraph Hill Books, 1501 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, United States