This event will take place virtually at 3pm ET

After moving from Peru north of the Arctic circle to begin graduate school, Claudia Ulloa Donoso began blogging about insomnia. Not hers, necessarily—the blog was never defined as fact or fiction. Her blog posts became the bones of Little Bird, short stories with a nod to fervent self-declaration of diary entries and the hallucinatory haze of sleeplessness. Blending narration and personal experience, the stories in Little Bird stretch reality, a sharp-shooting combination of George Saunders and Samanta Schweblin. Characters real and unreal, seductive, shape-changing, and baffling come together in smooth prose that, ultimately, defies fact and fiction.

Donoso will be in conversation with Lily Meyer, a writer, critic, and translator from Washington, D.C. She is a regular reviewer for NPR Books, and her criticism appears online in the Atlantic, Hyperallergic, the Poetry Foundation, and her short stories appear in Catapult, The Drift, The Sewanee Review, and Soft Punk.