Brandon Taylor

The dinner was to be at Galina’s apartment, in the East 70s. She had been watching a lot of Visconti and wanted to re-create the salons and dinners of The Innocent, Ludwig, and Death in Venice.
For approximately a decade, her husband, Igor, had been dying from a series of treatable cancers in nonessential tissues. “Dying is so boring after a while,” he said. In the spring, his doctors had told them that nothing more could be done and the time had come to transition to hospice care.

We encounter Bran, the narrator of Nell Zink’s new novel, Avalon, just as she leaves a party where something pivotal and distressing has happened to her. We know that it is pivotal because we immediately cut back in time to Bran’s childhood, and much of the novel becomes an inexorable march toward that fateful night. We also have some warning that the account we are about to hear is a fragile memory: “I have trouble recounting my childhood in chronological order.

We encounter Bran, the narrator of Nell Zink’s new novel, Avalon, just as she leaves a party where something pivotal and distressing has happened to her. We know that it is pivotal because we immediately cut back in time to Bran’s childhood, and much of the novel becomes an inexorable march toward that fateful night. We also have some warning that the account we are about to hear is a fragile memory: “I have trouble recounting my childhood in chronological order.