LIVE- Diane Cook: The New Wilderness w/ Arianna Rebolini

This event is in partnership with Buzzfeed Books. It will be held via Zoom and broadcast live via Books Are Magic's Facebook. Register to attend here.

Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the City—an over-populated, over-built metropolis where most of the population lives—is destroying her lungs. But what can Bea do? No one leaves the City anymore, because there is nowhere else to go. But across the country lies the Wilderness State, the last swath of open, protected land left. Here forests and desert plains are inhabited solely by wildlife. People are forbidden. Until now.

Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State as part of a study to see if humans can co-exist with nature. Can they be part of the wilderness and not destroy it? Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, this new community wanders through the grand country, trying to adhere to the strict rules laid down by the Rangers, whose job it is to remind them they must Leave No Trace. As the group slowly learns to live and survive on the unpredictable and often dangerous land, its members battle for power and control and betray and save each other. The farther they roam, the closer they come to their animal soul.

Diane Cook is the author of the story collection Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for The Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her stories have appeared in Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and other publications, and were included in the anthologies Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is a former producer for the radio program This American Life and was the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (2016). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Arianna Rebolini is the books editor at BuzzFeed News, and co-author of the novel PUBLIC RELATIONS. She lives in Queens.