Arts & Letters Live: Tess Gunty

In conversation with Ben Fountain

Tess Gunty's National Book Award–winning novel The Rabbit Hutch features residents of a low-cost housing complex attempting to build a life while the city decays around them: an online obituary writer, a mysterious young mother, a resident with a vendetta against vermin, and an uncommon young woman cohabiting with other teenagers who have aged out of the foster care system. Collectively they search for meaning in a world that seems determined to wear them down.

“A profoundly wise, wildly inventive, deeply moving work of art.” —Jonathan Safran Foer