Thieves Book Launch with Valerie Werder + Lucy Ives
THIEVES is an autofictional account of the strivings and humiliations of a gallery girl named Valerie. The tale of Valerie’s maturation, her life, and her adventures in sex and crime, eviscerates the industries of desire and consumption which produce, place a value on, and limit her creativity, freedoms, and responsibilities.
Watch as Valerie falls for the dashing and irresistible master shoplifter, Ted. Follow along as she begins to uncover Ted’s shady past and secret lives. Along the way, you will, with Valerie, encounter: bleeding meats suavely tucked into Ted’s loose jeans, the strangely seductive language of the highly personalized and persistent emails sent to Valerie from her local bank branch, and Valerie’s vivid dreams, including one in which the minds of the women of New York City are uploaded into identical metallic cyborg bodies.
In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, THIEVES is a wild, dark, and rollicking ride through a beguiling and dangerous Willy Wonka factory of gender, capitalism, sex, and art.
Valerie Werder is a fiction writer, recovering art worker, and doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University. Her debut novel, Thieves, was the winner of the 2020 Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Werder’s critical and creative writing has appeared in Public Culture, BOMB, Flash Art, and Necessary Fiction, and her performance work has been staged at Participant Inc., New York, and Artspace New Haven. Werder is a 2023–23 PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Mentor. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with a black cat and hundreds of books.
Lucy Ives is a novelist, poet, and critic. Her most recent fiction, Life Is Everywhere (Graywolf) was a best book of 2022 with The New Yorker and The Seattle Times. She writes frequently on visual art and has published short pieces in such magazines as Artforum, Harper’s, and Vogue. In 2024, Graywolf will publish An Image of My Name Enters America, a book of essays. Ives is currently Bonderman Professor of the Practice at Brown University.
Location: 1 Bleecker Street New York
Time: 7:00 — 8:30 pm EDT
Free!
