Join H&H Books and Blue Stoop as we host National Book Award-winning author of The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty, in conversation with Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia. We are honored to bring these two writers together in our bookstore for a reading and Q&A.
On page one of The Rabbit Hutch, Blandine Watkins exits her body. A fervent reader of all things mystic, this is an achievement she’s been striving for for most of her life. Blandine lives in apartment C4 alongside three other teenagers—all boys, all recently aged out of the state foster care system, all desperately in love with her and taken to animal sacrifice to prove it. In C12 lives a widowed logger who’s glued to dating apps. C8: a young mother who’s terrified of her newborn baby’s eyes. C6: an aging couple who keep finding dead mice on their balcony and are desperate for revenge. C2: a woman who screens online obituary comments for a living. These are the residents of the La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, better known as the Rabbit Hutch, a crumbling apartment building on the outskirts of Vacca Vale, Indiana, a land of abandoned factories, unnatural stretches of industrial cornfields, closed shops, disposable city design, and the ghost of Zorn Automobile, the once thriving economic hub of the city. And over the course of a single week one summer, their lives violently collide as they search for ways to live in this dying city, committing crimes—large and small—along the way. Exquisitely written, brimming with intelligence and dark humor and heart, The Rabbit Hutch is Tess’s ode to Indiana, to the postindustrial Midwest, to any city or town who’s been failed by the systems that were meant to support it. Her hope that we can all be delivered to a more luminous place.
TESS GUNTY earned an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Los Angeles Review of Books, No Tokens, Flash, and elsewhere. She was raised in South Bend, Indiana and lives in Los Angeles.
EMMA COPLEY EISENBERG is the author of The Third Rainbow Girl which was named a New York Times Notable Book and Editor’s Choice of 2020 as well as nominated for an Edgar Award, a Lambda Literary Award, and an Anthony Bouchercon Award among other honors. Her debut novel, Housemates, will be published by Hogarth in June 2024; she lives in Philadelphia, where she co-founded Blue Stoop, a community hub for the literary arts.
“Ambitious . . . Despite offering a dissection of contemporary urban blight, the novel doesn’t let social concerns crowd out the individuality of its characters, and Blandine’s off-kilter brilliance is central to the achievement.”—The New Yorker
“Transcendent . . . Compelling and startlingly beautiful . . . Gunty weaves these stories together with skill and subtlety.”—Clea Simon, The Boston Globe
“Here is something new, a first novel with the wisdom and tenderness of a masterwork; an unflinching look at the down and out that continues to rise and rise. The Rabbit Hutch is addictive, mesmerizing and unforgettable.”—Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf
“The most promising first novel I’ve read this year . . . A feeling of genuine crisis . . . propels the narrative through its many twists to the catharsis of its bizarre ending.”—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“As Gunty introduces each new voice, she makes storytelling seem like the most fun a person can have. She draws us along with rapturous glee while layering her symbolism so thick that the story should, by all rights, drown in it. But The Rabbit Hutch never loses focus thanks to Blandine, who has a kind of literary superpower: She’s aware of her place in the story, points out Gunty’s metaphors, arches a brow at the symbols and has something to say about all of it. . . . Redemption is possible, and Gunty’s novel consecrates this noble search.”—Cat Acree, BookPage (starred review)
“As surreal as it is genius . . . Spanning one week, the novel culminates in a shocking and violent climax that will stay with your long after you turn the last page.”—Kirby Beaton, BuzzFeed