Author Talk: Jen Fawkes at FPL

Jen Fawkes will be in conversation with Rachel Stuckey Slaton, co-owner of Two Friends Books in Bentonville. Books will be available for purchase by Two Friends and Pearl's, and Jen will be available for signing immediately following the event.

About Daughters of Chaos

In 1862, after a tragedy at home, twenty-two-year-old Sylvie Swift parts ways with her twin brother to trace the origins of an enigmatic playscript that’s landed on their doorstep. This text leads her to Nashville, an occupied city bustling with soldiers, saboteurs, partisans, powerful men––and powerful women. Sylvie translates the playscript by day, but at night, drawn into the work by the chief of the Union Army’s Secret Service, she acts as a spy. Both endeavors acquaint her with a sisterhood whose members—including Hannah, a fiery revolutionary to whom Sylvie is increasingly drawn—possess potentially monstrous powers. Sylvie soon becomes entangled in the Cult of Chaos, a feminist society steadfast in its ancient mission to eradicate the violence of men. Inspired by Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and the true story of Nashville’s attempt to exile its prostitutes during the American Civil War, Daughters of Chaos (The Overlook Press; July 9, 2024 weaves together “found” texts, fabulism, and queer themes to question familiar notions of history and family, warfare and power.

Jen Fawkes is the author of Mannequin and Wife, a 2020 Shirley Jackson Award Nominee, winner of the 2023 Phillip H. McMath Post- Publication Book Award and a Foreword INDIES gold medalist. Her collection Tales the Devil Told Me was a Foreword INDIES silver medalist, a Largehearted Boy Favorite Collection of 2021 and a finalist for the 2022 World Fantasy Award for Single-Author Story Collection. Her fiction won the 2021 Porter Fund Literary Prize and has appeared in One Story, Lit Hub, the Iowa Review, Best Small Fictions, and more. A two-time finalist for the Calvino Prize for fabulist fiction, Jen lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.