Fence Books cordially invites you to the Cambridge, MA launch of Valerie Werder's debut novel THIEVES. Claire Messud will join us for an evening of readings, conversation, and celebration.
Location: Barker Center Thompson Room, Harvard University
THIEVES is an autofictional account of the strivings and humiliations of a gallery girl named Valerie. The tale of Valerie’s maturation, her life and adventures in sex and crime, eviscerates the industries of desire and consumption which produce, place a value on, and limit her creativity, freedoms, and responsibilities.
Watch as Valerie falls for the dashing and irresistible master shoplifter, Ted. Follow along as she begins to uncover Ted's shady past and secret lives. Along the way, you will, with Valerie, encounter: bleeding meats suavely tucked into Ted's loose jeans, the strangely seductive language of the highly personalized and persistent emails sent to Valerie from her local bank branch, and Valerie's vivid dreams, including one in which the minds of the women of New York City are uploaded into identical metallic cyborg bodies.
In whip-smart, sharply humorous prose, THIEVES is a wild, dark, and rollicking ride through a beguiling and dangerous Willy Wonka factory of gender, capitalism, sex, and art.
Valerie Werder is a fiction writer, recovering art worker, and doctoral candidate in film and visual studies at Harvard University. Her debut novel, Thieves, was winner of the 2020 Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Werder’s critical and creative writing has appeared in Public Culture, BOMB, Flash Art, and Necessary Fiction, and her performance work has been staged at Participant Inc, New York, and Artspace New Haven. Werder is a 2023–23 PEN America Prison and Justice Writing Program Mentor. She lives in Somerville, Massachusetts with a black cat and hundreds of books.
Claire Messud is the author of six works of fiction. A recipient of a Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.