A reading and conversation with Graywolf Publisher Fiona McRae and Graywolf authors Maile Chapman (Your Presence is Requested at Suvanto), Jessica Francis Kane (The Report), and Marie Mutsuki Mockett (Picking Bones from Ash).
In Picking Bones from Ash, Marie Mutsuki Mockett examines the power and limitations of female talent in our globalized world. Mockett combines the best elements of a mystery story, ghost story, and magical realism.
Maile Chapman's unnerving debut novel concerns the mysteriously ill female patients at a remote hospital in rural Finland. Your Presence Is Requested at Suvanto is a lucid dream of a book; it is extremely clear and unnerving and full of gorgeously written surprises and frightening marvels.
In The Report, Jessica Francis Kane vividly explores the way tragedies are reported, remembered, and commemorated by re-imagining a World War II civilian disaster where 173 people die in a crowd while attempting to seek shelter from an air raid. Kane moves deftly among perspectives on the catastrophe: We eavesdrop on war battered townsfolk, the tardy policemen, the overburdened priest, the devastated shelter chief who feels responsible. Kane's command of period detail is marvelous.












