contents SEPTEMBER 21-28, 2022 VOL.27 NO

Lit Party « P.46

Katherine Arden

Waterbury author Katherine Arden moves through worlds like nobody’s business. In real life — before she was a best-selling author — she lived in Moscow, harvested macadamia nuts in Hawaii and skied in the French Alps. On the page, she journeys between the wintry wilderness of 14th-century Russia, a Lake Champlain haunted by demons and mystical spirit worlds. All of this traveling makes her a writer of immense imagination, capable of crafting tales in which readers of all ages can get lost.

Arden’s debut series for adults, the Winternight Trilogy, burst onto the fantasy scene in 2017 with the New York Times best-selling The Bear and the Nightingale. This book and the next two in the series, The Girl in the Tower and The Winter of the Witch, follow the young speaker-to-the-spirits Vasya as she grows into a woman who must save Russia from war and demonic threats.

The trilogy earned Arden nominations for the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, the Vermont Book Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Her sophomore series, the Small Spaces Quadrilogy for middle-grade readers, is set in a Vermont besieged by lake monsters and creepy clown demons.

Katherine Arden

EMILY HAMILTON

INFO

Katherine Arden reads on Saturday, September 24, 1:30 p.m., in the Pickering Room, Fletcher Free Library, in Burlington. Free.

Ruth Ozeki

Festival headliner Ruth Ozeki published her fi rst book, My Year of Meats, in 1998 and has been winning awards and garnering international acclaim ever since. Based in Massachusetts, New York City and British Columbia, Canada, the novelist, fi lmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest is adept at magical realism. “Ozeki ensouls the world. Everything in her universe, down to a windowpane and a widget, has a psyche and a certain amount of agency and can communicate,” Judith Shulevitz writes in a New York Times review of The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ozeki’s latest.

The 2021 novel, which won the UK-based Women’s Prize for Fiction, tells the story of a 14-year-old boy who

fi nds solace and guidance in the voices of sentient objects in his house after his father’s tragic death. Ozeki’s My Year of Meats and All Over Creation (2003) have been published in international acclaim 14 countries and 11 languages, and her A Tale for the Time Being (2013) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle realism. “Ozeki ensouls Award, and has been the world. Everything published in more in her universe, down than 30 countries. She is a professor of English language and literature at Smith College.

of Meats

ELIZABETH M. SEYLER

INFO

An Evening With Ruth Ozeki, Saturday, September 24, 4 p.m., at Burlington City Hall Auditorium. $10; $20 includes a presigned copy of e Book of Form and Emptiness.

Learn more about Article 22 at reprolibertyvt.org

Important medical decisions should be guided by a person’s health and wellbeing, not by a politician’s beliefs. Now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned by the Supreme Court, state-level protections of our reproductive autonomy are more vital than ever.

In Vermont, that means passing Article 22, the Reproductive Liberty Amendment, to explicitly enshrine the right to reproductive health care in our state constitution.