The First Steps to Fantasy: Drugs, Soda and Stephen King
The New Yorker - SVA Theatre 1
Alternative Realities

With Karen Russell, Gary Shteyngart, and Colson Whitehead. Moderated by Willing Davidson.

Karen Russell is the author of the collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, which includes "Haunting Olivia," her first New Yorker story. Her most recent story for the magazine, "The Dredgeman's Revelation," was included in the "20 Under 40" series and anthology and was part of her début novel, Swamplandia!

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad. His novels include Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; both were excerpted in The New Yorker. His début novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, won a Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and a National Jewish Book Award for fiction.

Colson Whitehead is the author of the novels The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, and Sag Harbor, part of which first appeared in The New Yorker, as well as The Colossus of New York, a meditation on his native city. His next novel, Zone One, comes out in October.

Willing Davidson is the associate fiction editor of The New Yorker.