Elvia Wilk: Oval – reading and talk with Brooks Sterritt
@ M. LeBlanc
3514 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago, IL 60647
Opening Thursday, June 27th, from 7PM - 10PM
On view through Thursday, June 27th
“Elvia Wilk’s Oval is a marvel. At the core of this seductive, acute, superbly-contemporary update of mid-period J.G. Ballard lies a deep-beating, deep-dreaming heart.” —Jonathan Lethem
“A fascinating near-future exploration of relationships, sustainability, and power. An extraordinarily accomplished debut novel.” —Jeff VanderMeer, author of Borne and Annihilation
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Join us as we welcome writers Elvia Wilk and Brooks Sterritt as they discuss Wilk’s debut novel Oval.
In the near future, Berlin’s real estate is being flipped in the name of “sustainability,” only to make the city even more unaffordable; artists are employed by corporations as consultants, and the weather is acting strange. When Anja and Louis are offered a rent-free home on an artificial mountain—yet another eco-friendly initiative run by a corporation—they seize the opportunity, but it isn’t long before the experimental house begins malfunctioning.
After Louis’s mother dies, Anja is convinced he has changed. At work, Louis has become obsessed with a secret project: a pill called Oval that temporarily rewires the user’s brain to be more generous. While Anja is horrified, Louis believes he has found the solution to Berlin’s income inequality. Oval is a fascinating portrait of the unbalanced relationships that shape our world, as well as a prescient warning of what the future may hold.
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Elvia Wilk is a writer and editor living in New York and Berlin. She writes about art, architecture, and technology for several publications, including frieze, Artforum, e-flux, Metropolis, Mousse, Flash Art, Art in America, and Zeit Online.
Brooks Sterritt is a writer whose work appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, Subtropics, Vice, and The Believer. His current book project is The History of America in My Lifetime, a novel concerned with the novel-film relation. Find him on Twitter: @brookssterritt.
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