Kafka Prize winner Danielle Evans will read from her winning collection "The Office of Historical Corrections" followed by a Q&A with audience members and a book signing. Danielle Evans will read in person, but we will have a virtual option for guests who would prefer to participate online. Please register for the webinar here.

 

From the Kafka Prize committee:

Danielle Evans’s story collection, The Office of Historical Corrections, is remarkable for its humor and buoyancy – remarkable, all the more so, given the book’s central themes of family illness, grief and historical trauma. It is rare to encounter a book so lighthearted and devastating, and the duality of the book, its mix of levity and heartache, is the source of both its pleasure and its resonance.  
 

The narrators of these stories often disarm with their wit and self-deprecation; just as often they startle and wrench: “You can hate my job all you want, but we’re both trying to solve the mystery of why this country doesn’t let Black people keep anything.” If the book feels timely, it is undoubtedly due to its investigation of the past, its dramatization of a nation’s harmful lies and omissions, and how such falsehoods disturb the ensuing decades and travel all the way to today. As history imprints itself on these characters, so too does this memorable collection mark its readers.