Lucy Biederman - "The Walmart Book of the Dead" - Sarah Geis

“A vastly imagined Wonderbook—fearsome, hilarious, familiar and arcane—in which a brilliantly savaged Walmart, both a temple and a tomb, spawns an epidemic of pharonic proportions, exhausting nothing less than everything. An extraordinary experience.” Rikki Ducornet, National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, author of Brightfellow and The Deep Zoo.

Lucy Biederman discusses her new book The Walmart Book of the Dead. She will be joined in conversation by Sarah Geis.

At the Co-op

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About the book: As for who reads this book

And who follows its spells

I know your name

You will not die after your death

In Walmart

You will not perish forever

For I know your name

So begins this darkly comic incantation on the gods and scourges of the 21st century. The Walmart Book of the Dead was inspired by the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, funerary texts with accompanying illustrations containing spells to preserve the spirit of the deceased in the afterlife. In Lucy Biederman’s version, shoplifters, grifters, drifters, and hustlers, desirous children, greeters, would-be Marxists, wolves, and circuit court judges wander Walmart unknowingly consigned to their afterlives.

“This BOOK is for the dark hours, the seam that ties the end of the evening to sunrise, when the bad, wrong things people do in and around Walmart are a hospital infection, red Rit dye in a load of whites, a gun in a classroom: by the time the problem is identified, it’s already ruined everything.”

About the author: Lucy Biederman is a lecturer in English at Case Western Reserve University. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and an MFA in creative writing from George Mason University. Her first book, The Walmart Book of the Dead, won the 2017 Vine Leaves Press Vignette Award. She has written four chapbooks of poetry, and her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared recently in Bat City Review, The Collagist, AGNI, Ploughshares, Conjunctions, and Pleiades. Her scholarship, which has been published in The Henry James Review, Women’s Studies, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, focuses on how contemporary American women writers interpret their literary forebears.

About the interlocuter: Sarah Geis is an audio producer, editor, and educator based in Chicago. She's a former artistic director of the Third Coast International Audio Festival.