Sigrid Nunez won the 2018 National Book Award for The Friend, a “beautiful” novel “crammed with a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love” (The Wall Street Journal) in which a woman is forced to adopt her deceased best friend’s Great Dane. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Berlin Prize, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Whiting Award, she is also the author of What Are You Going Through, Salvation City, The Last of Her Kind, A Feather on the Breath of God, and Sempre Susan, a memoir about her friend and mentor Susan Sontag. In The Vulnerables, Nunez offers a comic and elegiac study of a solitary female narrator who ponders questions of connection in our time of collective angst.

A “slim jewel of a novel” that is “what fiction should be” (The New York Times Book Review), Henry Hoke’s Open Throat follows the surreal Hollywood Hills wanderings of a lonely and inadvertently wise mountain lion grappling with desperate hunger, the intricacies of gender, and the challenges of urban living. Hoke is also the author of four other books, including a memoir titled Sticker, and his play At Sundown premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. His other work has appeared in No Tokens, Triangle House, Electric Literature, Carve, and the flash noir anthology Tiny Crimes. Co-creator of the Los Angeles-based Enter>text performance series and the humor editor at The Offing, he has taught at CalArts and the UVA Young Writers Workshop.

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