"A riveting indictment, shocking in its revelations." —Vivian GornickAbout this Event
Join us for the launch of Helen Betya Rubinstein's Feels Like Trouble, a paradigm-shifting collection of essays that challenges writers, publishers, and readers alike to reimagine the practice and teaching of writing.
Helen Betya Rubinstein will read from Feels Like Trouble, followed by a conversation with writer and educator Evan James, audience Q&A, signing, and reception.
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About the book
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2026
In this paradigm-shifting collection of essays, award-winning writer and acclaimed writing coach Helen Betya Rubinstein troubles the pieties at the heart of writing and publishing to ask: How else could this be?
From a viral indictment of copyediting to a widely taught essay on reimagining the writing workshop, Rubinstein’s iconoclastic takes reliably instigate controversy and conversation. Feels Like Trouble builds on these provocations, drawing on experiences in creative writing programs, one-on-one coaching sessions, and publishers’ meeting rooms to ask how we might reorient our practices away from harm. Whether speculating on the relationship between “good grammar” and “good taste,” casting a critical eye on the ubiquitous “compliment sandwich,” or demonstrating how the shared experience of an MFA program reverberates differently across twelve classmates’ lives, these playful and useful essays will challenge readers’ assumptions about what “good writing” means, and reinvigorate any writer, teacher, or editor’s practice.
Advance Praise for Feels Like Trouble
“Feels Like Trouble is a riveting indictment, shocking in its revelations of the pressure to conform to what the culture identifies as ‘good writing.’” —Vivian Gornick, author of The Situation and the Story and Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader
“Feels Like Trouble has forever changed the way I read, write, teach, assess, and how I think about institutions—what I want from them, how they bestow value, and the ways power dynamics shape feedback, legitimacy, and our whole concept of worth. It’s rare to encounter a book so radical and transgressive that it doesn’t simply expose what lies behind the curtain, but offers an entirely new way of existing within it. But just as it dismantles a problematic framework, it offers a salve for undoing that harm. Reading this book feels like learning to walk again.” —Zaina Arafat, author of Our Arab and You Exist Too Much
“Feels Like Trouble exploded the way I think about being an artist. Helen Betya Rubinstein gives a searing account of how power operates in literary institutions and a roadmap for more capacious ways of writing, teaching, and publishing. Like the best excavations of the industry, it’s also a delicious exploration of power dynamics that’s tremendously fun to read—I devoured it. This book had my back in ways I truly needed.” –Tajja Isen, author of Tough Love and Some of My Best Friends
About the author
Helen Betya Rubinstein is the author of The Case Against Rubinstein: An Anti-Fiction (forthcoming in 2027), as well as a booklet of lyric fictions, Because Sex Is a Story & Sex Is a Song. Her essays and fiction have been published in Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and frequently in Literary Hub and Jewish Currents. Helen is a writing coach in ongoing practice with writers across genre.
About Evan James
Evan James is the author of the essay collection I've Been Wrong Before and the novel Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe. He teaches in the MA in Writing at Johns Hopkins University.
Event venue
Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA, United States
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