ALEXANDER MAKSIK DISCUSSES HIS NEW NOVEL SHELTER IN PLACE, WITH MARISA SILVER

Shelter in Place (Europa Editions)

 

Set in the Pacific Northwest in the jittery, jacked-up early 1990s, Shelter in Place, by one of America’s most thrillingly defiant contemporary authors, is a stylish literary novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family, and the dramatic consequences of love.

Joseph March, a twenty-one year-old working class kid from Seattle, has just graduated college, has fallen in love with the fiercely independent Tess Wolff, and his future beckons, unencumbered, limitless, magnificent. Joe’s life implodes when he starts to suffer the symptoms of bipolar disorder, and, not long after, his mother kills a man she’s never met with a hammer. Later, spurred on by his mother’s example and her growing fame, Tess enlists Joe in a secret, violent plan that will forever change their lives.

Maksik sings of modern America’s battered soul and of the lacerating emotions that make us human. Magnetic and masterfully told, Shelter in Place is about the things in life we are willing to die for, and those we’re willing to kill for.

Praise for Shelter in Place

“Shelter in Place is a magnificent novel. Alexander Maksik charts the legacy of violence and the limits of justice with grace, power, and clarity.”—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

“Unsettling and honest, a remarkably insightful portrait of mental illness, Shelter in Place is elegiac, savage and mournful, a beautifully written novel about the echoes of our actions, of love and its consequences.”—Aminatta Forna, author of The Hired Man

“Shelter In Place is a love story like none I’ve ever read before…Densely ruminative, and bracingly unromantic, the ballad of Tess, Joe, and his parents tests the brutal outer-limits of patriarchy, the bleak realities of untreated mental illness, and the nature of loyalty in a world where every woman is out for herself.  And every man, as well.”—Kate Bolick, author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own 

“An unsettling and beautiful exploration of mental illness, love, violence, family and sexual politics. Maksik’s artful story outruns all sorts of received ideas and cliched narratives...You’ll be haunted by it in the best possible way.”—Katie Roiphe, author of The Violet Hour

“On every page we’re reminded of the paradox of how mysterious, thorny, and delicate family relationships can be.”—Kirkus Reviews

Alexander Maksik is the author of the novels You Deserve Nothing and A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2013, as well as finalist for both the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. His writing has appeared in The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper's, Tin House, Harvard Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Narrative Magazine, among other publications. He is a contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler, and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and The Corporation of Yaddo.

Marisa Silver is the author of the novel Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award. She is also the author of The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist); No Direction Home; and two story collections, Alone with You and Babe in Paradise (a New York Times Notable Book and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year). Silver’s fiction has won the O. Henry Award and been included in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and other anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles.