Staff Picks: Bunnies, Berries, and Baffling Omissions

Mona Awad. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe.

Mona Awad’s prose is dangerous. She crafts beautiful meals laced with poison; her new novel is a satirical glimpse into elite education that transforms a college into the deep, dark woods of a fairy tale. Set on the ivy-covered campus of Warren University, a monied institution gleaming at the heart of a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden city, follows the M.F.A. candidate Samantha Heather Mackey as she becomes entwined with four fellow writing students, a glittering, eerie group of women who call one another “Bunny.” The Bunnies lure Samantha into their mysterious Workshop, where “kill your darlings” is a literal practice, the creative process a twee but twisted game of is steeped in strange magic, real forces lurk throughout the novel, lying just past the confines of campus: poverty, gentrification, mental illness. The Bunnies’ creativity is equally driven by magic as it is by class; they “inherited it, like our summer houses, our grand pianos, our perfect, nuanced taste.” Awad captures the allure of these tastemakers, the desire to be part of a , and the insidiousness that comes with power, a “necklace gleaming in the tall grass that could be a snake.”