Ruthie Fear, Maxim Loskutoff‘s debut novel, presents the rural West as a place balanced on a knife-edge, at war with itself, but still unbearably beautiful and full of love. Michael Zapata’s The Lost Book of Adana Moreau tells the mesmerizing story of a Latin American science fiction writer and the lives her lost manuscript unites decades later in post-Katrina New Orleans. Loskutoff and Zapata will be in conversation with Julia Phillips, autor de Disappearing Earth, a novel that deftly probes community life in the far eastern Russian peninsula of Kamchatka when two sisters go mysteriously missing.