Rebekah Bergman — The MUSEUM OF HUMAN HISTORY — in Conversation with Annie Hartnett on Sep 7 at 6 p.m.
Rebekah Bergman will talk about her acclaimed debut novel, The Museum of Human History, with author Annie Hartnett (Unlikely Animals).
After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious “sleep” holds the answers to their life’s most pressing questions: Kevin Marks, a museum owner obsessed with preservation; Monique Gray, a refugee and performance artist; Lionel Wilhelm, an entomologist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist; and Evangeline Wilhelm, Maeve’s identical twin. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects.
Weaving together speculative elements and classic fables, and exploring urgent issues from the opioid epidemic to the hazards of biotech to the obsession with self-improvement and remaining forever young, Rebekah Bergman’s The Museum of Human History is a brilliant and fascinating novel about how time shapes us, asking what—if anything—we would be without it.
With melancholy imagination, Bergman elegantly tackles nothing less than the entire arc of human history. . . . the novel blends fairy tale, philosophy, and shades of literary-futurist classics like Never Let Me Go.
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
A startlingly assured debut. . . . Similar to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. . . . a tightly constructed, wonderfully written, utterly original, and astoundingly good novel.
—Booklist, Starred Review
Rebekah Bergman’s The Museum of Human History is one of the most agile novels I have read in a long time. It reads like a documentary retold as a dream retold as a mystery novel. What a wise, good-hearted debut!
—Kate Bernheimer, author of Fairy Tale Architecture
Rebekah Bergman is a fiction writer living in Rhode Island. Her debut novel, The Museum of Human History, was published by Tin House Books in August 2023. Rebekah received a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from The New School. Her short stories have been published in Tin House Online, Joyland, and other journals. She is a contributing editor of NOON. Rebekah was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a winner of The Masters Review Anthology Prize, judged by Rebecca Makkai. She has earned fellowships, grants, and residencies from Art Farm, Brown University, and Tent Creative Writing and was selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 (2019) and nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Annie Hartnett is the author of novels Rabbit Cake (Tin House Books, 2017) and Unlikely Animals (Ballantine/Random House, 2022). Unlikely Animals was listed as one of the best books of 2022 by the Washington Post and BookRiot, the winner of the Julia Ward Howe award, and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Rabbit Cake was listed as one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2017, was a finalist for the New England Book Award, and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Annie has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and the Associates of the Boston Public Library. She holds degrees from the MFA program at the University of Alabama, Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, and Hamilton College. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, daughter, and dog.
Books will be available for purchase at the event and in store.
To purchase online see the links below.