About this Event
Please note that an RSVP does not guarantee you a seat. We can accommodate approximately 50 seated and 80 standing. If you require a seat, please plan to arrive early.
About the book:
A. is an amateur translator, living alone in an unforgiving, late-capitalist metropolis. Adrift and burdened by debt following a medical trauma, she makes rent caring for a young boy who is not and could never be her own. Her nights are spent on the dance floor, chasing spontaneous connection. There, she encounters N., who shares her numbed state and sometimes her bed.
Among N.’s meager possessions, A. comes across a slim book about an unnamed foreign town of disappearing boys. The book, Field Notes, documents the stories of a community of mothers who assemble to mourn their missing sons together. A. is transfixed by this collective chorus of primal grief, the mothers’ preternatural strength, and their intuitive care for one another. When a near-assault stuns A. out of her inertia, she takes off for the city where Field Notes was written in search of its author and the end of the story. But A.’s digging leads her instead to the traces of a murdered poet, a mysterious woman whose legacy will intersect unexpectedly and pivotally with A.’s own life.
Poignant and profoundly humane, Mass Mothering is told through layered voices, written fragments, and recorded testimonies. It is a luminous story of the mutuality of grief, the aftershocks of violence in a globalized era, and the world-bending force of a mother’s love.
About the participants:
Sarah Bruni is a graduate of the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis and holds a master’s in Latin American Studies from Tulane University. She has taught English and writing classes in New York and St. Louis, and she has volunteered as a writer-in-schools in San Francisco and Montevideo, Uruguay. She is also the author of the novels Mass Mothering and The Night Gwen Stacy Died. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, and her translations have appeared in the Buenos Aires Review. She lives in Chicago with her family.
Idra Novey is the author of the poetry collection Soon and Wholly and the novel Take What You Need, named one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023 and chosen as a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She’s translated the work of numerous authors, including Clarice Lispector, Manoel de Barros, and Garous Abdolmalekian. Her co-translation with Garth Greenwell of Spanish poet Luis Munoz will be published this May with Simon & Schuster.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Community Bookstore, 143 7th Avenue, Brooklyn, United States
USD 0.00
