Left Bank Books presents debut author Miranda Popkey, who will sign and discuss her novel Topics of Conversation.

For readers of Rachel Cusk, Lydia Davis, and Jenny Offill— Topics of Conversation is a compact tour de force about sex, violence, and self-loathing from a ferociously talented new voice in fiction

Topics of Converstaion follows an unnamed female narrator from her first summer post-college to her years as a single mother in California’s Central Valley, always hungry for experience and hell bent on upending her life. The narrative unfolds in a series of conversations between women—the stories they tell one another; the stories they tell themselves—circling questions of desire, disgust, anger, envy, guilt, and despair. Topics of Converstaion is a searing look at what it means to come of age, to grow up, to love, to lust as a woman in this world. “There’s always someone, or so I’d been led to believe: on business or in the dog house or out on the proverbial prowl,” pronounces Miranda’s narrator. “That was the danger of being a woman.” At the center of her striking debut is this: how much bad behavior are we still willing to permit?

Miranda Popkey was raised in Santa Cruz, CA. After receiving her degree from Yale, she spent 2009 – 2010 living in McAllen, Texas, teaching at a high school through Teach for America. (She, admittedly, was underprepared and cried in class more than once.) She left Texas for an internship with The Paris Review and shortly thereafter was hired as an assistant at FSG, where she worked from February of 2011 to November of 2014. She currently lives in Boston with her husband.