A reader's interview with Emily Hunt Kivel

Hello!

From time to time, I interview writers about my two favorite topics: reading and writing. This week I’m excited to bring you my discussion with Emily Hunt Kivel, whose debut novel Dwelling comes out this week from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Just this morning, Jo Hamya in the New York Times book review called Dwelling a “beautifully radical debut” and “the most fun I’ve had reading in years.”

Dwelling is a fairy tale set in a housing crisis, after all the landlords in New York City simultaneously evict their tenants, including Evie, a 20-something graphic designer and orphan. In many ways, Evie’s world sounds very familiar:

The actions had all been engineered to seem so gradual, Evie thought, even banal. One subtle slight after another. Nothing shocking, per se. And yet here they were, on the day that the city’s final and most radical amendment had gone into place and everyone was out, on the street, looking up at their soon-to-be-sanitized streets and feeling tricked. By their landlords. By the city. By their mothers and fathers. By their ancestors. By Aha!: Apartments and Homes Anywhere. By God.

Ejected onto the street along with all her neighbors, their furniture, and the “innards of an Italian restaurant—tables, chairs, and a lot of dried pasta,” Evie develops a plan to move to the small town of Gulluck, Texas, where she has a distant cousin.

Evie’s priorities are simple: first find a home and a job, then rescue her sister, Elena, who has been institutionalized and who Evie dreams is “locked somewhere in a tower, crying to get out, pounding against windows.” When the only place Evie can afford to live in Gulluck turns out to be a house in the shape of a giant shoe and she meets a magical locksmith, all her priorities come together to inspire a quest worthy of the Brothers Grimm.

I am a big fan of Emily’s writing. Years before we met in Austin, I added her story “The Juggler’s Wife” to my list of favorite short stories (you can read about my reading lists here), so I was delighted to learn that she is brilliant, charming, and funny in person as well as on the page. Our discussion about Texas, Marxism, fairy tales, and footwear began over iced coffees at a cafe in East Austin and continued in a shared Google ...