A01=Emily Hunt Kivel
Author_Emily Hunt Kivel
Category=FM
debut
dystopian
eq_bestseller
eq_fantasy
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eviction
fairy tale
hero's journey
housing crisis
ling ma
literary fiction
postmodern
severance
texas
Product details
- ISBN 9780374616069
- Weight: 413g
- Dimensions: 146 x 218mm
- Publication Date: 22 Sep 2025
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The world is ending. It has been ending 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 institutionalised 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.
And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners - the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie - parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed - has nothing and no one. Except, 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 moment - for 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.
