“Empty Set” Book Discussion | Green Apple Books

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Veronica Gerber Bicecci discusses her new novel, Empty Set, with translator Christina MacSweeney. Sponsored by The Center for the Art of Translation.

Praise for Empty Set

“Verónica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt.” —Francisco Goldman

“From the very beginning, Verónica Gerber set out to write a novel that would end up at a loss for words. She alone could achieve this feat: because she’s a visual artist who takes everything she reads in as concentric circles threaded with color, and because she writes essays on painters who write across canvasses and writers who paint plots from the realities of life. . . . She alone could bring the necessary silence to a novel so perfect it ended up leaving me speechless as well.” —Jorge F. Hernández

“Empty Set(ES) belongs to the set of Great Fragmentary Novels(GFN), which in turn fits plainly and simply within the set of Great Novels(GN). Verónica Gerber writes with the modesty and care of those who may seem to belong more to the set of Visual Artists(VA) than Writers(W)—each fragment is a precious miniature that exudes subtle, melancholy humor.” —Juan Pablo Villalobos

About Empty Set

How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences, tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.

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