October 2nd: K. Patrick in Conversation with Merve Emre
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, K. Patrick will discuss their debut novel Mrs. S with Merve Emre.
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Monday, October 2nd at 7 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
Mrs. S (Published by Europa Editions, 2023)
In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a butch antipodean outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of “matron.” Within this landscape of immense privilege, where difference is met with hostility, the matron finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body.
That is until she meets Mrs. S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite—an assured, authoritative paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless summer, their unspoken yearning blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer fades, a choice must be made.
Seductive, stylish, and disarmingly wry, K. Patrick’s bold and revelatory debut smolders with the heat of summer as it explores the queer experience and the force of forbidden love.
K. Patrick is a writer based in Glasgow. Their poetry has appeared in Poetry Review and Five Dials, and was shortlisted for The White Review Poetry Prize in 2021, the same year that K. was shortlisted for The White Review Fiction Prize for their short story “Eggs.” In 2020, they were runner-up in the Ivan Juritz Prize and the Laura Kinsella Fellowship. Mrs. S is their debut novel.
Merve Emre is the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University and the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2017), The Ferrante Letters (Columbia University Press, 2019), and The Personality Brokers (New York, 2018), which was selected as one of the best books of 2018 by the New York Times, the Economist, NPR, CBC, and the Spectator, and informs the CNN/HBO Max documentary feature film Persona. She is the editor of Once and Future Feminist (MIT, 2018), The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Liveright, 2021), and The Norton Modern Library Mrs. Dalloway (Norton, 2021). She is finishing a book titled Post-Discipline: Two Futures for Literary Study (under contract with the University of Chicago Press) and writing a book called Love and Other Useless Pursuits (under contract with Doubleday US / Harper Collins UK).
She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books to American Literature, American Literary History, PMLA, and Modernism/modernity. In 2021, she was awarded the Robert B. Silvers Prize for Literary Criticism and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle. She served as one of the judges of the International Booker Prize, and serves on the boards of Words Without Borders and the Hawthornden Foundation.