Kiley Reid in conversation with Mathilde Merouani
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Kiley Reid in conversation with Mathilde Merouani
June 12 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Writersâ Workshop graduate Kiley Reid will read from her fresh and provocative novel Come & Get It, one of the most anticipated books of the year and a New Yorker Best Book of the Week. Set in 2017 at the University of Arkansas, Come & Get It is about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students. In a NYT Book Review, Julia May Jones calls Reid âa social observer of the highest order,â and NPR says âReid nails the anxiety about the future (and the present) for some students and the unperturbed overconfidence for others, depending largely on who has needed to develop defenses and who has not. That, of course, means taking into account the contexts of race and class and sexuality, as well as social skills and trauma history. She nails the heightened interpersonal conflicts that grow in cramped shared rooms like mildew on the walls. She burrows deeply into one young woman’s pain and the lessons she learns about what it means to have other people invited into that pain to be spectators.”
Kiley Reid is the author of Such a Fun Age, which was a New York Times bestseller and longlisted for the Booker Prize. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, The Guardian, and others. Reid is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan.
Mathilde Merouani is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writersâ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Joyland, The Common, Minor Literature[s], Fugue, and 3:AM Magazine. She won the 2021 Joyland Open Border Fiction Prize, and translated a collection of Michel Butorâs essays for Vanguard Editions.