On Wednesday October 30th, author of the novel Elsewhere (Celadon Books, 2022), Alexis Schaitkin, read her recent work in Tishman Lecture Hall. The event was hosted by the literature department at Bennington College and was open to the public.
According to her website, Alexis Schaitkin’s novel, Elsewhere, published in 2022 by Celadon Books, was a finalist for the Carol Shields Prize, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and an ALA Notable Book. Her debut novel, Saint X (Celadon Books), was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020 by the New York Times book review. It was an ABA Indies Introduce and Indie Next selection and an Amazon Best Book of 2020 and has been translated into seven languages. A limited series adaptation of the novel was released by Hulu in 2023. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Ecotone, the Southern Review, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. Her fiction has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She lives in the Berkshires with her husband and their two children.
An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by literature professor Dr. Mariam Rahmani. According to the The New York Times book review, “Elsewhere joins the recent roster of impressive novels that have employed speculative elements to examine new motherhood…Schaitkin’s pace is firmly controlled, her arcs built line by patient line… Without any signifiers of location and time, Schaitkin’s narrative seems to reach for a sense of universality, and intentionality: as though every element of this carefully crafted theater has been placed there for a reason…A welcome addition to a shelf of speculative fiction about the joys, failures and metamorphoses involved in having a child, Elsewhere asks: Is motherhood, like the town itself, meant to be a featureless place, best experienced under a haze of collective brainwashing?”
Schaitkin started off the reading with an excerpt from Elsewhere, a fable about a town that exists in its own world. People of this town have isolated themselves from the rest of the world. Periodically, the people would wake up in the morning and find out that women — mothers — disappeared. The narrator takes on the readers in this time from adolescence to adulthood. Additionally, Shaitkin also read from her work-in-progress project, To Life, a novel within a novel.
When asked about the voice in the story, Schaitkin replied, “For this I had a vision where I wanted the reader to listen to the same song. I was trying to create a sustained tone or feeling.”
The reading was followed by a Q&A, which was then followed by a book signing. The copies of Elsewhere were sold in Tishman.
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