Alexander Maksik is one of America’s most thrillingly defiant contemporary authors. His is the author of You Deserve Nothing and A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a finalist for both the William Saroyan Prize and Le Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. A contributing editor at Condé Nast Traveler, his writing appears in numerous publications including Best American Nonrequired Reading, Harper’s, Tin House, Harvard Review, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon and Narrative Magazine. Maksik is the recipient of a 2015 Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships from the Truman Capote Literary Trust and The Corporation of Yaddo. He is the co-artistic director of the Can Cab Literary Residence in Catalonia, Spain and his work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Shelter in Place

Set in the Pacific Northwest in the jittery, jacked-up early 1990s, Shelter in Place is a stylish literary novel about the hereditary nature of mental illness, the fleeting intensity of youth, the obligations of family and the dramatic consequences of love. Joseph March, a 21-year-old working class kid from Seattle, has just graduated college. He has fallen in love with the fiercely independent Tess Wolff, and his future beckons, unencumbered, limitless and magnificent. Joe’s life implodes when he starts to suffer the symptoms of bipolar disorder, and, not long after, his mother kills a man she’s never met with a hammer. Later, spurred on by his mother’s example and her growing fame, Tess enlists Joe in a secret, violent plan that will forever change their lives.