The Ruby and Green Apple Books present Marie-Helene Bertino! Bertino joins us for the release of her novel, Beautyland, alongside author and Ruby Kristin Keane!
We will celebrate with a reading, author talk, and Q+A, with signing line and socializing to follow. Books will be available for purchase at the event.
About Beautyland
A wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth, by the acclaimed author of Parakeet. 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 that 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.
About Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino is the author of Parakeet, 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. She was the 2017 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in Cork, Ireland. She has received the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the Mississippi Review Prize, and fellowships from MacDowell, Sewanee, and New York City’s Center for Fiction, and her work has twice been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts. She teaches creative writing at New York University and Yale University and lives in Brooklyn.
About Kristin Keane
Kristin Keane is the author of An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, Luminaries, and is a contributor to the forthcoming compendium Double Features, about the work of photographer Patrick Pound. She has written for The Washington Post, Ploughshares, New England Review, Creative Nonfiction, Reading Research Quarterly, American Educator, The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers, and other publications. She earned a PhD from Stanford University.