MAY 14 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Spaceships and Friends: Lincoln Michel presents Metallic Realms
in conversation with Helen Phillips, Chloe Cooper Jones and Kevin Nguyen
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Fantastic universes and personal dramas collide as a group of friends blur the line between real life and fiction with delightfully disastrous results from the acclaimed author of the “timeless and original” (The New York Times) The Body Scout.
Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln finds his life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic lives of the pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a higher calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written word: The Star Rot Chronicles.
Written collectively by Michael’s best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit science fiction writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to extraterrestrial romances and interstellar wars. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now.
But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest universe ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the fun house reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group’s fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one mission: to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.
Lincoln Michel's previous books are the story collection Upright Beasts and the novel The Body Scout, which was named one of the 10 Best Science Fiction Books of 2021 by The New York Times and one of the 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time by Esquire. His writing has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, Granta, The New York Times, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He runs the popular literary newsletter Counter Craft and coedited the anthologies Tiny Crimes and Tiny Nightmares. He was born in Virginia and lives in Brooklyn.
Helen Phillips is the author of six books, including, most recently, the novel Hum, a Slate Top 10 Book of 2024, an Economist Best Book of 2024, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her novel The Need was longlisted for the National Book Award and named a New York Times Notable Book. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the New York Times, and on Selected Shorts. A professor at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with artist/cartoonist Adam Douglas Thompson and their children.
Chloé Cooper Jones is a professor, journalist, and the author of the memoir Easy Beauty, which was named a best book of 2022 by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, TIME Magazine, and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. She was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist in Feature Writing in 2020. She is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and an Associate Professor of Writing and Director of the MFA Nonfiction Concentration at Columbia University. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Kerhonkson, New York.
Kevin Nguyen is the author of New Waves and Mỹ Documents. He is a features editor at The Verge and lives in Brooklyn, NY.