Fiction reading with Marie-Helene Bertino – Thursday, November 6
Thursday, November 6
Book-signing: 6:30 PM
Reading: 7:00 PM
Special Collections Library
1101 19th Ave South, Nashville, TN 37212
At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings. For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then, at a precarious moment, a beloved friend urges Adina to share her messages with the world. Is there a chance she is not alone? Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland is a novel of startling originality about the fragility and resilience of life on our Earth and in our universe. It is a remarkable evocation of the feeling of being in exile at home, and it introduces a gentle, unforgettable alien for our times.
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of, most recently, Beautyland, a National Book Critics Circle Finalist and a New York Times Notable 100 and Time Magazine Top 10 Book of 2024. A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow in Fiction, she is currently the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. Exit Zero, her second short story collection, was released in April! She is also the author of the novels 2.am. at The Cat’s Pajamas, Parakeet, and the story collection Safe as Houses, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, McSweeneys, Granta, BOMB, Guernica, and many others. Honors include the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Pushcart Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Pen/O. Henry Prize Stories, and Mississippi Review and has been featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts” program. She taught for many years in the Creative Writing programs of NYU, The New School, and Institute for American Indian Arts.
This event is part of the Gertrude C. & Harold S. Vanderbilt Reading Series.