Sold out from Coffee House Press. Available wherever ebooks are sold.
A novella by Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt
June 15, 2015 • Ebook • 978-1-56689-391-6
The lives of Marge Quinn, stenographer, and Abraham Chelikowsky, sometimes painter, are improvised from Edward Hopper’s iconic “Office at Night.”
Edward Hopper’s painting “Office at Night” is open to endless interpretation. In this collaborative novella, Kate Bernheimer and Laird Hunt borrow from his practice of improvising on “the facts” of observation to create a work of art, imagining the lives of its characters: stenographer Marge Quinn and her boss, the sometimes painter Abraham Chelikowsky.
Co-commissioned by Coffee House Press and the Walker Art Center, and inspired by Edward Hopper’s “Office at Night” (1940) from the Walker’s collection, the writers describe their process as “taking up residence” inside the painting, imagining the lives and relationships between the enigmatic characters in Hopper’s iconic painting. The story will be released as a serial on the Walker’s website throughout the month of April and published as an e-book by Coffee House Press in June 2014.
Supported in part by the McKnight Foundation.
Image courtesy the Walker Art Center.
Edward Hopper (1882-1967)
Office at Night, 1940
Oil on canvas, 22 3/16 x 25 1/8 in. (56.4 x 63.8 cm)
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Gift of the T.B. Walker Foundation, Gilbert M. Walker Fund
About the Author
Kate Bernheimer has been called “one of the living masters of the fairy tale.” She is the author of a novel trilogy and the story collections Horse, Flower, Bird and How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales (forthcoming from Coffee House Press in August 2014) and the editor of four anthologies, including the World Fantasy Award-winning and best-selling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: 50 New Myths. She founded and edits the literary journal Fairy Tale Review.
Laird Hunt is the award-winning author of six books, including a short story collection and five novels from Coffee House Press: The Impossibly, Indiana, Indiana, The Exquisite, Ray of the Star, and Kind One, which was a finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the 2013 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. Currently on faculty in the University of Denver’s Creative Writing Program, he is editor of the Denver Quarterly.