Both coming-of-age story and cautionary tale. In her mother's absence,
Jean is torn between the adult world and her surreal fantasies of escape
as she and Fender build a fort to survey the rumors of their town.
Annie DeWitt is a fiction writer, essayist, and critic. She holds a
BA from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University
School of the Arts. She teaches in the Undergraduate Creative Writing
Program at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Granta,
the Believer, Tin House, Guernica, Esquire, NOON (where an
excerpt of this novel first appeared), BOMB, Electric Literature,
and the American Reader, among others. Her story Influence, which
first appeared in Esquire's Napkin Fiction Project, was recently
anthologized in Short: An International Anthology, edited by Alan
Ziegler (Persea, 2014). DeWitt was a co-founding editor of Gigantic, a
literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the United
States and abroad. She currently pens a bimonthly nonfiction column
about art, literature, film and criticism for the Believer, called
Various Paradigms.