Women who find themselves confined to wild places, trapped in a cell, by circumstance, by lack of means, by animals and men; and haunted by the past and present alike. The short stories in Lauren Groff’s Florida are set in a landscape of physical and environmental dangers, where panthers and snakes lie in wait and hurricanes brew; while personal crises of sex, loneliness, and rage threaten her characters. Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is the story of a woman serving two consecutive life sentences in prison, whose thoughts are occupied by the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, and whose days are defined by the women around her all hustling to survive the institution. Moderated by John Freeman, editor of Freeman’s anthology.

Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent novel is The Mars Room. She lives in Los Angeles.

John Freeman is an American writer and literary critic. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual, and author of two books of nonfiction, The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read a Novelist, and the book of poetry, Maps. He has also edited two anthologies of writing on inequality, Tales of Two Cities and Tales of Two Americas. The former editor of Granta, he lives in New York, where he teaches at The New School and is writer-in-residence at New York University. The executive editor at LitHub, he has published poems in Zyzzyva, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Nation. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.