About this Event
Please join us for a free, in person on Thursday, September 5th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Rachel Kushner's new novel, Creation Lake. Rachel will be in conversation with Anna Korbbluh!
About Creation Lake:
From Rachel Kushner, a Booker Prize finalist, two-time National Book Award finalist, and "one of the most gifted authors of her generation" (The New York Times Book Review), comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France--a propulsive page-turner of glittering insights and dark humor.
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France.
"Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader.
Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"--making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"--shadowy figures in business and government--instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.
In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.
Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner's rendition of "noir" is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.
About Rachel Kushner:
Rachel Kushner is the author of The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.
About Anna Kornbluh:
Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English and a member of the United Faculty Bargaining Team at UIC. She is the author of Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso 2024), The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (University of Chicago 2019), Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP 2014). Essays on climate aesthetics, tv, academic labor, and psychoanalysis have appeared in venues like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Diacritics,Differences, and Portable Gray. She is the founding facilitator of InterCcECT (The Inter Chicago Center for Experimental Critical Theory), and a partner in Humanitiesworks.org.
About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Rachel and Anna will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online after the event.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Exile in Bookville, 410 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, United States
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