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Melissa Broder / The Pisces
May 9, 2018 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm UTC+0
Free
The Bindery hosts an evening with So Sad Today author Melissa Broder reading from her anticipated debut novel, The Pisces. With her in conversation is The Millions editor, Lydia Kiesling — please join us!
Lucy has been writing her dissertation on Sappho for nine years when she and her boyfriend break up in a dramatic flameout. After she bottoms out in Phoenix, her sister in Los Angeles insists Lucy dog-sit for the summer. Annika’s home is a gorgeous glass cube on Venice Beach, but Lucy can find little relief from her anxiety — not in the Greek chorus of women in her love addiction therapy group, not in her frequent Tinder excursions, not even in Dominic the foxhound’s easy affection.
Everything changes when Lucy becomes entranced by an eerily attractive swimmer while sitting alone on the beach rocks one night. But when Lucy learns the truth about his identity, their relationship, and Lucy’s understanding of what love should look like, take a very unexpected turn. A masterful blend of vivid realism and giddy fantasy, pairing hilarious frankness with pulse-racing eroticism, THE PISCES is a story about falling in obsessive love with a merman: a figure of Sirenic fantasy whose very existence pushes Lucy to question everything she thought she knew about love, lust, and meaning in the one life we have.
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Melissa Broder is the author of the essay collection So Sad Today and four poetry collections, including Last Sext. Her poetry has appeared in POETRY, The Iowa Review, Tin House, Guernica, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. She writes the “So Sad Today” column at Vice, the astrology column for Lenny Letter, and the “Beauty and Death” column on Elle.com. She lives in Los Angeles. Author photo by Lord Byron.
Lydia Kiesling is the editor of The Millions and the author of The Golden State, a novel publishing September from FSG/MCD. Her essays and criticism have appeared at outlets including The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Slate, and The New Yorker online, and have been recognized in Best American Essays 2016. She lives in San Francisco with her family. Author photo by Andria Lo.