DWELLING

DWELLING is a dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home. It opens with a mass eviction. Every renter in NYC is made homeless. Instantly and without warning leaving only the landlords and owners the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed has nothing and no one.

The world is ending. And has been for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie's mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

With her worldly possessions stowed in her previous landlord's basement, Evie is at a loss at where to go. Her attempts to extract a raise at work fail. Desperate, she remembers a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel's Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero's journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our momentfor anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

Emily Hunt Kivel is a writer whose fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, American Short Fiction, New England Review, and Guernica, among other publications. She teaches at St. Edward's University and Columbia University. Dwelling is her first novel.

Like Ling Ma's Severance, Halle Butler's The New Me, or Hilary Leichter's Temporary, Dwelling is a bold debut that dramatizes and satirizes contemporary structural crises of millennial women. But it goes beyond the workplace to the home: it's a very funny and eerily resonant allegory of the housing shortage taken to its furthest ends. There's a class-conscious sendup of wealth stratification, there's death and loss and longing, there's burnout and missed rent and evil landlords and mass chaos. But Dwelling is a novel with a beating, warm sense of humanity, unusually and contagiously full of love.