The Center for Fiction Presents Genre-Defying Authors Patrick Cottrell and Jordy Rosenberg in Conversation with Andrea Lawlor

Join us for an evening with Patrick Cottrell and Jordy Rosenberg, two of contemporary literature’s most daring, genre-defying voices, as they discuss their brilliantly unconventional new novels Afternoon Hours of a Hermit and Night Night Fawn with Andrea Lawlor, the author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Cottrell’s latest book follows Dan Moran, a Korean adoptee, trans writer, and reluctant teacher, five years after the events of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace. When a mysterious envelope arrives containing a childhood photo of his deceased brother, Dan returns home against his better judgment. What unfolds is an existential noir infused with absurd humor: mistaken identities, detective fantasies, unsettling encounters, and an aching search to understand the gulf between who we are and how we’re seen. Cottrell, a Whiting Award winner, delivers a profound, restless inquiry into identity, memory, and the strange alchemy of making fiction.

In Night Night Fawn, Rosenberg (author of Confessions of the Fox, a 2018 finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize), presents a deathbed confession like no other. Terminally ill and high on opioids in her cramped Manhattan apartment, protagonist Barbara Rosenberg chronicles her life with ferocious, unfiltered candor. There’s her smut-loving late husband, her failed stabs at stardom, her unhinged theories on gender and politics, and the two great heartbreaks she cannot outrun: her estranged trans son and a lost friend whose betrayal still burns. Blurring memoir and fiction, diatribe and manifesto, the novel is a darkly funny portrait of intergenerational conflict and the messy, impossible work of love.

Don’t miss this stirring conversation about family, identity, finding the humor in despair, and the radical possibilities of form-breaking fiction. A book signing will follow the event.