Maxim Loskutoff (Come West and See) and Mikkel Rosengaard (The Invention of Ana)

Booksmith hosts a special evening of readings by Maxim Loskutoff (Come West and See) and Mikkel Rosengaard (The Invention of Ana). Please join us!

Come West and See
by Maxim Loskutoff

This searing debut reimagines the American West through linked stories describing a violent rural separatist movement.

In an isolated region of Idaho, Montana, and eastern Oregon known as the Redoubt, an armed occupation of a wildlife refuge is escalating into civil war. Against this backdrop, twelve stories of ordinary lives explore the loneliness, fragility, and heartbreak inherent to love. Families feel the far-reaching shockwaves of displacement and division. A mother makes a hard choice for her sons when their father goes to lead a standoff with the federal government. An unemployed carpenter joins a militia after his wife leaves him and the first airstrikes raze the streets of his hometown. A former soldier raises the daughter of a dead comrade in a bunker beneath an abandoned farm.

Ranging from the cities to the small towns of the West, and imbued with its own brand of radical empathy, Loskutoff’s fiction is both timely and timeless. Come West and See surges with rage, longing, and fear, and offers startling insights into the wounds of the American people.

A graduate of New York University’s MFA program, Maxim Loskutoff has been honored with the Nelson Algren Literary Award, a Global Writing Fellowship in Abu Dhabi, and the M Literary Fellowship in Bangalore. He lives in western Montana.

The Invention of Ana
by Mikkel Rosengaard

The Invention of Ana illuminates the profound power of stories to alter the world around us—and the lives of the ones we love.

On a rooftop in Brooklyn on a spring night, a young intern meets the intriguing Ana Ivan who lives her life like a prime number: wild and unbroken and only divisible with herself. Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana’s enthralling stories—of her unlucky countrymen; of her parents’ romance during the worst years of Nicolae Ceaucescu’s dictatorship; of a Daylight Savings switchover gone horribly wrong. Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor. Following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time—an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month.

Descending into the blackness with Ana, the intern slowly loses touch with his own existence, entangling himself in the stories of Ana, her starry-eyed mother Maria, her math-prodigy father Ciprian, and  their journey from Bucharest to Morocco’s Atlas Mountains to New York City.

A three-time recipient of the Danish Arts Foundation’s Literary Fellowship,Mikkel Rosengaard’s stories have appeared in the Architectural Review, Bomb Magazine, PBS’s Art21, and many other publications. He grew up in Elsinore, Denmark, and lives in New York City.

RSVP appreciated but not required.