Claire Oshetsky in conversation with Britta Stromeyer

Please join us on Saturday, May 9th at 6:30pm for an evening with Claire Oshetsky in conversation with Britta Stromeyer.  We're having a party for the new book "Evil Genius".

An exuberant, brutally hilarious novel about a young woman’s insatiable quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way

ABOUT THE BOOK 

It’s 1974 and San Francisco is full of mystery and menace. Nineteen-year-old Celia Dent keeps telling herself how lucky she is to be working at the phone company and to be married to her Drew, a man who says he loves her. Celia’s contentment with her little life is shattered, though, when a woman she knows from work is murdered in a love tryst gone awry. What would that be like, Celia wonders, to die for love—or to kill for love? What would it be like to live each moment passionately and with full awareness that each breath is bringing her closer to her last?

Before Celia knows it, her musings about love-and-death happenings are bleeding into daily life. Suddenly she’s playing hooky from work and searching for a love tryst of her very own. She’s practicing her marksmanship at a local gun range and thinking about how good it would feel to bury something sharp inside her domineering husband’s ear. It’s all pretend, though, until the night comes when Celia finally goes too far, and she and Drew are set on a deadly collision course.

Exhilarating, surreal, and bitingly clever, Evil Genius is a comic noir exploring obsession and desire—and what happens when a sweetly seditious young woman dares to imagine a better life.

Claire Oshetsky is the author of the novels EVIL GENIUS (February 2026) POOR DEER (January 2024) and CHOUETTE (November 2021), all from Ecco.

Claire's novel POOR DEER won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in 2025. It was also named a "Best Book of 2024" by the New Yorker, and the audiobook adaptation, read by Sophie Amoss, was a finalist for the 2025 Audie Award Audiobook of the Year.

Claire's novel CHOUETTE won the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was longlisted for the Pen/Faulkner award for fiction. Chouette was a finalist for the Barbellion Prize, dedicated to the furtherance of disabled voices in literature, and made the honor list for the 2022 Otherwise Prize, awarded to works of science fiction or fantasy that explore gender roles.

Claire's short fiction has been featured in Fiction International, Chicago Quarterly Review, Catamaran, Alaska Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry, North American Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. 

Britta Stromeyer’s writing appears in The Common, Tupelo Quarterly, Flash Fiction Magazine, Bending Genres Journal, Necessary Fiction, On The Seawall, Marin Independent Journal and other publications. She was a finalist for the Bellingham Review Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, SF Writer’s Grotto, PEN, and a Committee Member for Litquake. She has been a frequent reader for the Firecracker Awards and reads for Flash Fiction Magazine. A former editor for Tuxedo Literature & Arts Journal & FastForward Magazine, Britta has authored award-winning children’s books. She’s a member of the National Book Critics Circle and holds an MFA from Dominican University, CA, an M.A. from American University, and a Certificate in Novel Writing from Stanford University.