Wed 11/11 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Xita Rubert is joined in conversation with Joyce Carol Oates.  The Key Biscayne Affair is a darkly funny coming-of-age novel where Florida’s sun-drenched strangeness meets the dangers of derelict parenting and misplaced devotion.

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In this lush, sharply observed novel, an unnamed, unreliable narrator remembers her surreal stay on Key Biscayne, where nobody lives unless they have something to hide. As the narrator is gradually drawn into the island’s morally ambiguous world, putting her innocence at risk, she begins to overidentify with her father. She becomes not just witness but also accomplice to his erratic behavior, acquiescing to his efforts to isolate herself and her brother from their concerned mother, whose calls from Spain go unanswered.

The Key Biscayne Affair is a tender, disorienting, and deeply disquieting coming-of-age story disguised as a psychological thriller. Xita Rubert delivers a powerful meditation on childhood and the knotty truths that memory leaves behind.

Xita Rubert is a Spanish novelist. In 2024, she won the Herralde Novel Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for the novel in the Spanish language, for The Key Biscayne Affair. Her first novel, My Days with the Kopp Family, was translated into several languages. She is based in New York and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”

This event is co-sponsored by the Princeton Public Library and Labyrinth Books.