Emily Hunt Kivel
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.
Emily Hunt Kivel’s debut novel, The Dwelling, comes out this August from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Caught in a “Revitalization” program, which includes the spontaneous mass-removal of all New York’s renters from their apartments, Evie Cavallo heads for a distant relation’s house in Gulluck, Texas. Her second cousin, Terry Lang, guides her as she tours the town’s idiosyncrasies and eventually installs Evie in the cowboy-boot-shaped house of a cobbler. From here, things get delightfully weird and speculative, juxtaposing late-capitalist unaffordability with the sardonic tone of fairy tales. As one character reminds us, “Fairy tales used to be real.” Throughout the novel, the dark potential and eerie winds of fable are never far away.