Rachel Genn’s What You Could Have Won

When:
November 14, 2020 @ 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
2020-11-14T14:00:00-06:00
2020-11-14T15:00:00-06:00

Join us for a reading from Rachel Genn, whose second novel, What You Could Have Won, will be released by And Other Stories in early November.

This event will take place via Zoom; see details below. The novel can be purchased via our online store, or call us on 512-322-2097 to arrange curbside pick up.

“A captivating portrait of regret, addiction, and the will to survive.” —Publishers Weekly

Fame is the only thing worth having. Love is temporary brain damage. Or so thinks Henry Sinclair, a failing psychiatrist, whose career-breaking discovery has been pinched by a supervisor smelling of nipple grease and hot-dog brine. An emotional miser and manipulator par excellence, desperate for the recognition he’s certain his genius deserves, Henry claws his way into the limelight by transforming his girlfriend—a singer-in-ascendance, beloved for her cathartically raw performances—into a drug experiment. As he systematically works to reinforce feelings of worthlessness while at the same time feeding off Astrid’s fame, and as Astrid collapses deeper into dependence, what emerges is a two-sided toxic relationship: the bullying instincts of a man shrunk by an industry where bullying is currency, and the peculiar strength of a star more comfortable offloading her talent than owning her brilliance.

Pinging between their apartment in New York (where they watch endless episodes of The Sopranos), a nudist campsite in Greece (where the tantalizingly handsome Gigi thwacks octopuses into the sand), and a celebrity rehab facility in Paris (founded by the cassock-wearing and sex-scandal plagued ‘artist’ Hypno Ray), What You Could Have Won is a relationship born of regrettable events, and a novel about female resilience in the face of social control.

Rachel Genn is a neuroscientist, artist and writer who has written two novels: The Cure (2011) and What You Could Have Won (2020). She was a Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence (2016), creating The National Facility for the Regulation of Regret, which spanned installation art, VR and film (2016-17). She has written for Granta, 3:AM Magazine, and Hotel, and is working on Hurtling, a hybrid collection of essays about the neuroscience, art and abjection of artistic reverie. She’s also working on a binaural experience exploring paranoia, and a collection of non-fiction about fighting and addiction to regret. Genn works at the Manchester Writing School and the School of Digital Arts, both at Manchester Metropolitan University, and lives in Sheffield.

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