About this Event
We are absolutely thrilled to host Eiren Caffall for an event celebrating her new novel, All the Water in the World. For this event, Eiren will be joined in conversation by Gina Frangello.
Please note: This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Masks are required at our in-person events.
In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future.
"Captivating...The setting, the detailed emotive descriptions, and nail-biting adventure are incandescent." —Library Journal (starred)
All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.
Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most – love and work, community and knowledge – will survive.
Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician whose work has appeared in Guernica, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, The Rumpus, and on three record albums. She is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant and a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship at Northwestern University, among other awards. The author of a memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary (2024), she lives in Chicago with her family. All the Water in the World is her first novel.
Gina Frangello’s fifth book, the memoir Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint), has been selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and BookPage. Gina is also the author of four books of fiction, including A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting. Her first two books, My Sister’s Continent and Slut Lullabies, out of print for some time, are soon being reissued by Northwestern University Press. Now a lead editor at Row House Publishing, Gina also brings more than two decades of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review, and the Creative Nonfiction Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is on the low residency MFA faculty at the University of Nevada- Reno/Tahoe and runs Circe Consulting, a full-service company for writers, with the writer Emily Rapp Black.
Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation for this event, please email [email protected] by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email [email protected].
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Women & Children First, 5233 North Clark Street, Chicago, United States
USD 0.00
