A reading and conversation with author Emily Mitchell, moderated by Tania James.
About the book:
Delightfully blending literary fiction with speculative genres, the stories in The Church of Divine Electricity somehow manage to feel as though they could take place today. In Emily Mitchell’s created worlds, as in our own, technology bewitches, especially with its ability to heighten both connections and isolation.
Whether being held by a giant and comforting machine, allowing micro-drones to record one’s every moment for a year to win prize money, or choosing self-mutilation in exchange for a bionic hand, these characters navigate technological and social change. The familiar can turn unrecognizable and disorienting—sometimes in a flash, sometimes gradually. Lyrical, haunting, and often funny, these stories ask us to consider what—and who—gets left out of a seemingly utopian future of technological advancements. Finely observed, thoughtful, and vivid, Mitchell’s stories get under your skin. It’s not that the best-laid plans could lead us astray—it’s that they may already have.
About the author:
Emily Mitchell grew up in London, England and moved to the United States as a teenager. She is the author of a novel, The Last Summer of the World (W. W. Norton, 2007), which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Award, and two collections of short fiction, Viral (W. W. Norton, 2015) and The Church of Divine Electricity (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025), winner of the 2023 Elixir Press Fiction Prize. Her stories have appeared in Harpers’, The Sun, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, American Short Fiction and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the New Statesman (UK), Guernica and the Washington Independent Review of Books. She serves as fiction editor for New England Review and teaches at the University of Maryland. She lives just outside Washington DC with her husband, the writer and editor J. M. Tyree.
Tania James will join us for a conversation with the author.
Tania James is the author of four works of fiction, including most recently the novel Loot, which was longlisted for The National Book Award and the Carol Shields Prize. Her short stories have appeared in Granta; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; and One Story, among other places, and thrice featured on Symphony Space Selected Shorts. She is an associate professor of English in the MFA program at George Mason University.