From the Litquake archives! During our 2018 festival, National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner joined Litquake for an evening on her New York Times bestselling novel The Mars Room. This novel tells the story of Romy Hall, who’s at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, Kushner’s fiction “succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.” This event features Kushner in conversation with San Francisco Chronicle culture columnist Caille Millner, complemented by appearances from the Voice of Witness collection Six by Ten: Stories from Solitary editor Mateo Hoke and contributor Mohammed Ali. Recorded live at the Make Out Room on Thursday, October 18, 2018. Litquake's 20th anniversary festival will take place October 10-19, 2019. For all the latest updates, follow us @litquake on Facebook and Twitter!