Megan Peak’s debut collection Girldom chronicles coming of age as a woman: the violence of discovery, the evolution of sexuality, and the demanding yet necessary acts of self-preservation and resistance. Born and raised in Florida, she lives in Cambridge, MA, with her husband and dog.

Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony fellowship. Laura van den Berg is the author of two story collections, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us and The Isle of Youth, and the novel Find Me. Her fiction has received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, an O. The Third Hotel is a propulsive, brilliantly shape-shifting novel from an inventive author at the height of her narrative powers. As the distinction between reality and fantasy blurs, Clare finds grounding in memories of her childhood in Florida and of her marriage to Richard, revealing her role in his death and reappearance along the way. Grief-stricken and baffled, Clare tails Richard, a horror film scholar, through the newly tourist-filled streets of Havana, clocking his every move. He’s wearing a white linen suit she’s never seen before, and he’s supposed to be dead. Shortly after Clare arrives in Havana, Cuba, to attend the annual Festival of New Latin American Cinema, she finds her husband, Richard, standing outside a museum. In Havana, Cuba, a widow tries to come to terms with her husband’s death-and the truth about their marriage-in Laura van den Berg’s surreal, mystifying story of psychological reflection and metaphysical mystery. Please join us at Lawndale Arts Center to welcome author Laura van den Berg, reading with Megan Peak! Presented in partnership with Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts at the Lawndale Art Center

The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg