Author Emily Barton at Brookline Booksmith

Brookline Booksmith welcomes Emily Barton, author of The Book of Esther.

What if an empire of Jewish warriors that existed in the Middle Ages had never fallen—and was the only thing standing between Hitler and his conquest of Russia? Simultaneously a steampunk Joan of Arc and a genre-bending tale of a counterfactual Jewish state by a writer who invents worlds “out of Calvino or Borges” (The New Yorker), The Book of Esther reaffirms Emily Barton’s place as one of her generation’s most gifted storytellers.

Emily Barton’s fiction has appeared in “Story”, “American Short Fiction”, and “Conjunctions”. Her first novel, “The Testament of Yves Gundron”, called “blessedly post-ironic, engaging, and heartfelt” by Thomas Pynchon, won the Bard Fiction Prize and was named a “New York Times” Notable Book of the Year. She is the recipient of a 2006 artist’s grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.