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Virtual Event: Tiphanie Yanique and Edwidge Danticat
October 21, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm PDT
Free
Join us on Thursday, October 21st at 6pm PT when Tiphanie Yanique discusses her novel, Monster in the Middle, with Edwidge Danticat on Zoom!
Praise for Monster in the Middle
“Monster in the Middle is as boundless as it is affecting. Yanique’s prose leaps with possibility, as her characters live and laugh and fight and love. Yanique captures romance from its peaks to its craters, deftly weaving whole worlds from everything in between.”—Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
“A total wonder. Utterly original and structurally thrilling. I am in awe of this novel and Tiphanie Yanique’s masterful storytelling. This feels like a modern fable, a contemporary folk ballad full of unforgettable characters who, by the end, felt as familiar to me as family. What a gorgeous ode to love and its power.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Filthy Animals and Real Life
“Tiphanie Yanique is one of our very best writers. This book is another marvel, expertly mixing voices and styles, even structures and traditions, to capture the way lives naturally flow together and apart over time…Monster in the Middle is a book to study and savor.” —Matthew Salesses, author of Craft in the Real World
About Monster in the Middle
From the award-winning author of Land of Love and Drowning, an electric new novel that maps the emotional inheritance of one couple newly in love.
When Fly and Stela meet in 21st Century New York City, it seems like fate. He’s a Black American musician from a mixed-religious background who knows all about heartbreak. She’s a Catholic science teacher from the Caribbean, looking for lasting love. But are they meant to be? The answer goes back decades—all the way to their parents’ earliest loves.
Vibrant and emotionally riveting, Monster in the Middle moves across decades, from the U.S. to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, to show how one couple’s romance is intrinsically influenced by the family lore and love stories that preceded their own pairing. What challenges and traumas must this new couple inherit, what hopes and ambitions will keep them moving forward? Exploring desire and identity, religion and class, passion and obligation, the novel posits that in order to answer the question “who are we meant to be with?” we must first understand who we are and how we came to be.
About Tiphanie Yanique
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the award-winning novel Land of Love and Drowning, as well as the poetry collection, Wife. Winner of the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Award and a Fulbright scholarship. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2020. Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University.