Genevieve Hudson, ”PRETEND WE LIVE HERE” w/ Henry Hoke and Myriam Gurba

Future Tense Books is thrilled to be publishing Pretend We Live Here by international writer Genevieve Hudson. In this debut collection of stories, Genevieve explores the idea of home and what it means to find one: in the body, in the world, in other people. Her characters are seekers, whose actions are influenced by their slippery identities and by the strange landscapes that surround them.

In “Boy Box,” a young woman yearns to test her luck with a wild punk girl crush. In “God Hospital,” a character journeys deep into the woods of Alabama in search of an infamous religious healer, hoping he can fix her teeth. In “Adorno,” someone in need of forgiveness crosses paths with a band of radical vegan activists and gets subsumed into their world. In “Dance!,” a recluse writes a breakthrough song for her pink dolphin, but the song’s success only drives her further away from society. Set in Amsterdam, the Pacific Northwest, and the Deep South, these stories hum with sexual tension, queerness, displacement, longing, humor, and dark nostalgia.

Hudson is joined in conversation by Henry Hoke (The Book of Endless Sleepovers) and Myriam Gurba, a writer, artist, and teacher based in Long Beach, California.