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Julia Phillips in Conversation W/ Jennifer Wilson
October 10, 2019 @ 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
“One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls–sisters, eight and eleven–go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.
Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty–densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska–and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused.
Julia Phillips is a Fulbright fellow whose writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, and The Paris Review. She lives in Brooklyn. Her first novel, Disappearing Earth, was published in 2019 to wide acclaim.
Jennifer Wilson is a writer and critic. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She received a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University and currently teaches writing at Rutgers University. You can find her in Philadelphia and on Twitter (@JenLouiseWilson).
“A genuine masterpiece, but one that is easily consumed in a feverish stay-up-all-night bout of reading pleasure. It’s as much a portrait of humanity as of a small Kamchatka community.”
—Gary Shteyngart
“Disappearing Earth is not only a viscerally wide-ranging introduction to the land and culture of the Kamchatka Peninsula, as well as a missing persons thriller—as beautifully written as it was, I still couldn’t turn the pages fast enough—it’s also a wrenching meditation on the agonies of those losses to which we never fully adjust. This is a dazzlingly impressive first novel.”
—Jim Shepard”