First Fiction Friday: Georgina Beaty’s The Party is Here

Georgina Beaty writes stories that are bold and audacious—about, say, a group of high-school debaters who spark an international UN resolution and begin obsessively, competitively adopting polar bears and endangered frogs, or an artist who discovers she can experience (and get high on) the potential life of each one of her frozen eggs, or an Olympic figure skater in a world where indoor ice rinks are no longer allowed to exist, or a community of young women who literally start turning into trees. And she spins these outlandish scenarios into stories that are entirely believable, gorgeously written, and wildly entertaining.In these stories, set five minutes in the future, the climate crisis is not just looming in the background but pushing its way into the forefront of every thought, every decision, every party. The women in this book are making decisions about the rest of their lives (their friendships, their careers, their fertility) but in a world where the future is decidedly uncertain. In short: in a world that is entirely like ours.The Party Is Here is a perfect collection of this moment: about the ambitions and confusions of contemporary people and the turbulence of modern life. It’s exciting and powerful and edgy and beautiful and you will definitely want to pick it up. X+Y: Take the undeniable stylishness and of-the-moment feel of Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker and combine it with the impossible-to-ignore climate narrative of Catherine Bush’s Blaze Island.

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Georgina Beaty is a writer and actor who grew up in Canmore, Alberta. Her fiction has appeared in The Walrus, New England Review, The New Quarterly, PRISM, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. She is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. The Party Is Here is her first book.Photo Credit: Emily Ray Reese