Name: In-Store: Deb Olin Unferth: Earth 7 w/ Chloé Cooper Jones
Start: 2026-06-11T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-06-11T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Books Are Magic Montague

$In-Store: Deb Olin Unferth: Earth 7 w\/ Chlo\u00e9 Cooper Jones$

“Unferth swerves from the mundane to the extraordinary, from biting to soaringly celebratory, often in a single sentence.” —Helen Phillips
About this Event

Event guidelines:

Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
A signing will follow the talk.
Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/Y1qK8VmCRz8
As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

An end-of-the-world love story, full of pathos and humor, about the future and past of our planet.

Well, that’s about it for the story of planet earth, poor earth, reduced in Earth 7 to not much more than a piece of burnt coal. But, as Deb Olin Unferth shows in her latest electrifying novel, life—and love—persist in unexpected ways even in the most inhospitable circumstances.

Earth 7 is the story of two women, one who was raised in a pod in the ocean and the other who may or may not be a robot. Earth has been severely depopulated, not due to any one calamity but because of many. Some humans have given up, gone off to Mars. Others pursue digital eternal life. And yet others, like Dylan and Melanie, are holdouts, and some of those holdouts are constructing a vast molecular collection in hopes that someone in the future may be alive to make a new Earth. Foolhardy? Misguided? Probably. But what can a human (or a robot) do? The Martian named Zee might have an opinion, too.

By the end of Unferth’s wild, poetic, consistently surprising, and slyly philosophical novel, the reader has traveled to the very edges of the cosmos and into the muck of a wandering “soul globule.” It’s the most exhilarating work to date by one of our most distinctive and original American writers.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of seven books, including the novels Earth 7 and Barn 8 and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance. Her stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, and New York Times Magazine. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor at the University of Texas at Austin, she teaches for the Michener Center for Writers, the New Writers Project, and directs the Pen City Writers at a south Texas penitentiary.

Chloé Cooper Jones is a philosophy professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Time, and others. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient and, in 2020, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.