The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: Dwelling, Emily Hunt Kivel

Dwelling

Emily Hunt Kivel

Reader Score

75%

75% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Great

Based on 5 reviews on

BookMarks logo

A dazzling, surrealist fairy tale of a young woman's quest for house and home--from New York to the Texas hinterlands and, maybe, back again.

The world is ending. It has been ending for some time. When did the ending begin? Perhaps when Evie's mother died, or when her father died soon after. Perhaps when her sister, Elena, was forcibly institutionalized in a psychiatric hippie commune in Colorado. Certainly at some point over the last year, as New York City spun down the tubes, as bedbugs and vultures descended, as apartments crumbled to the ground and no one had the time or money to fight it, or even, really, to notice.

And then, one day, the ending is complete. Every renter is evicted en masse, leaving only the landlords and owners--the demented, the aristocratic, the luckiest few. Evie--parentless, sisterless, basically friendless, underemployed--has nothing and no one. Except, she remembers, a second cousin in Texas, in a strange town called Gulluck, where nothing is as it seems.

And so, in the surreal, dislodged landscape, beyond the known world, a place of albino cicadas and gardeners and thieves, of cobblers and shoemakers and one very large fish, a place governed by mysterious logic and perhaps even miracles, Evie sets out in search of a home.

A wry and buoyant fairy tale set at the apex of the housing crisis, Emily Hunt Kivel's Dwelling takes us on a hapless hero's journey to the end of the world and back again. Madcap and magical, hilarious and existential, Dwelling holds a funhouse mirror to our moment--for anyone in search of space, belonging, and some semblance of justice.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Aug 5th, 2025
  • Pages: 320
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.42in - 5.79in - 1.08in - 0.89lb
  • EAN: 9780374616069
  • Categories: LiteraryFairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & MythologyAbsurdist

About the Author

Hunt Kivel, Emily: - Emily Hunt Kivel's short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, BOMB, New England Review, and American Short Fiction, for which she was nominated for the National Magazine Award in 2023. She is from California but now lives in Texas, where she currently serves as the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Scholar in Residence at the University of Houston. Dwelling is her first novel.

Critics’ reviews