In Conversation: Stacy Skolnik & Hannah Regel

'Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…'

A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.

Join us for a conversation with Stacy Skolnik, author of The Ginny Suite, and Hannah Regel ,author of The Last Sane Woman, chaired by Montez Press editor Hasti, on Thursday 9th July from 6.30pm til 9pm at Burley Fisher Books.

Praise for The Ginny Suite:

The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men.
— Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love

The Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug

Perversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard.
— Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions

The Ginny Suite proves that Stacy Skolnik is one of the most timely and original voices in post-pandemic New York.
— Joshua Citarella, author of Politigram and the Post-left

A Handmaid’s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era.
— Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0

Praise for The Last Sane Woman:

Disquieting and gorgeous, The Last Sane Woman plucks images from the world with the claustrophobic pleasure of picking a scab. It reaches deep into the negative spaces of failure and precarity, and from these resources assembles something caustic, elegant, elusive and foreboding. It’s also funny, with an offbeat, sly lightness that comes from knowing exactly how high the odds are stacked against you. I was hooked by the conversation between Regel’s protagonists, looping across generations to give voice to the pains of making and the shameful pleasures of destruction.

— Daisy Lafarge, author of Life without Air and Paul

The Last Sane Woman is a brilliant, slyly funny, and acutely observed meditation on the process both of the making of objects and of one’s own life. Regel’s prose is gorgeous and deftly rendered on every page.

— Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure

In Regel's alluring debut novel a London art school graduate takes a job at a feminist archive and stumbles on a mystery buried in the collection ... a distinctive story of female friendship.

— Publishers Weekly

Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.

Hannah Regel has two published collections of poetry, When I Was Alive and Oliver Reed (both Montez Press, 2017 and 2020). Her debut novel, The Last Sane Woman, will be published in July 2024 by Verso. She lives in London and works as an editor at Book Works.

Hasti

is a poet, writer, and editor at Montez Press. A member of the inaugural Southbank New Poets Collective and the Ledbury Poetry Critics, they are the recipient of the 2023 White Review Poet's Prize and the 2022 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry. They have co-written short sci-fi film DIGGING, produced by Film4. Hasti also hosts open mic and poetry night Fresh Lip, and its sister show for Montez Press Radio, Fresh Air.