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A Literary Cocktail Hour-Very Cold People with Sarah Manguso
- 325 reads
The Brattleboro Literary Festival presents our monthly virtual Literary Cocktail Hour with acclaimed novelist Sarah Manguso in conversation with Vermont author Makenna Goodman.
Sarah’s new novel, Very Cold People, which takes place in the frozen, snow-padded town of Waitsfield, Massachusetts, is all she has ever known. But this is no picturesque New England. Once "home of the bean and the cod, where Lowells speak only to Cabots, and Cabots speak only to God," by the tail end of the twentieth century it is an unforgiving place awash with secrets. Very Cold People tells Ruthie's story through her eyes—this is her story. From the shame handed down by her immigrant forebears and indomitable mother, to the violences endured by her high school friends, each suffering a fate worse than the last. Part social commentary and part Gothic horror, Very Cold People is an ungilded portrait of girlhood at the crossroads of history and social class. In her highly anticipated debut novel, Sarah Manguso has produced a masterwork on how very cold places make for very cold people, and it takes a pitiless look at an all-American whiteness.
She will be in conversation with Vermont writer Makenna Goodman.
Biographies: Sarah Manguso is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet, and the author, most recently, of the novel Very Cold People (February 2022). Her other work includes the nonfiction books 300 Arguments, Ongoingness, The Guardians, and The Two Kinds of Decay, the poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, and the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape. Her work has been recognized by an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship, and the Rome Prize. She grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Los Angeles, where she currently teaches creative writing at Antioch University.
Makenna Goodman is the author of The Shame, which was named a Harvard Review Favorite Book of 2020, a White Review Recommended Read, a Refinery29 Best New BooRecommended Read, a Bustle Most Anticipated Book, a Boston.com Book Club Pick, and more. Based in Vermont, Goodman is a former editor of books on agriculture and food who writes about, among other things, the intersection of land stewardship and capitalism.
