Fiction Is Better Than It’s Ever Been: The Millions Interviews Brian Birnbaum
The Dead Rabbits moniker dates back to a 19th-century New York street gang, but it’s about to have a major resurgence in the form of a new literary press, Dead Rabbits Books—itself a spinoff of New York’s Dead Rabbits Reading Series, founded in 2014 by writers Devin Kelly, Katie Rainey, and Katie Longofono, who met while attending the MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.
Brian Birnbaum pitched the idea for Dead Rabbits Books to Rainey, his domestic (and now business) partner, in 2018, following a litany of failed attempts (including a near-miss) to publish his debut novel, Emerald City. After roping in software engineer Jon Kay, the trio decided to make Emerald City their inaugural title. (They have also announced upcoming titles by David Hollander, Annie Krabbenschmidt, and Rainey.) The trio wanted to use Birnbaum’s novel to launch the press before asking any other authors to trust them with their work. But Birnbaum also took particular inspiration from Sergio De La Pava, who had initially self-published his novel A Naked Singularity.
Having also attended Sarah Lawrence from 2013 to 15, I was privileged to read Birnbaum’s in a germinal state at the end of our time together there; I later received a revised draft in the fall of 2017 that significantly expanded the novel’s scope and website, suffice it to say that it’s one of the most electrifying performances by a debut novelist this side of the year 2000—a heartrending tragedy of addiction, an absurdist comedy of privilege and inadequacy, an inter-generational crime saga to rival , a disarmingly touching love story, and, at bottom, a book about the ineradicable ties of family.
