Novelist Rachel Lyon Reads at Literature Evening

On Wednesday, March 12th, at 6:30pm in Tishman, novelist Rachel Lyon—a visiting Literature faculty member at Bennington in Spring 2022 and Spring 2023—was back on campus to read from her new novel, Fruit of the Dead, an Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year. According to an invitation email, “the novel reimagines the myth of Persephone and Demeter set in the modern underworld of a lush private island.” The event was hosted by the literature department at Bennington College in Tishman Lecture Hall.

Rachel Lyon is the author of Self-Portrait with Boy, (Scribner, 2018), a finalist for the Center for Fiction’s 2018 First Novel Prize, and Fruit of the Dead, (Scirbner, 2024), an Oprah Magazine best book of 2024 which the New York Times called “superb” and “refreshing.” Rachel’s short stories have appeared in One Story, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, and Electric Literature. She lives in Western Massachusetts, and has taught most recently at Bennington College and the American University of Paris, where she was the 2024 Paris Writer in Residence.

An enthusiastic audience of Bennington College students, faculty, and guests attended this event, which started off with an introduction by Director of Poetry at Bennington, Michael Dumanis. According to a starred review of Fruit of the Dead by Kirkus, “Lyon’s skillful and luscious prose encourages empathy… an affecting novel with touches of the fantastical, weaving explorations of power, youth, wealth, and familial love” and according to Alexis Schaitkin, author of Saint X, a recent reader for a recent literature evening, “In hallucinatory prose, Rachel Lyon evokes a world lush with pleasure and peril. She has an uncanny grasp on what it is to be a teenage girl, caught between the safety of a mother’s love and the alluring offerings of adulthood. An all-consuming fever-dream of a novel, Fruit of the Dead pulls you under and refuses to let go.”

The reading was followed by a Q&A in which Bennington students asked questions about craft, revision, and the creative process of writing the book. The event concluded with a book signing. The copies of Fruit of the Dead were sold in Tishman.