Ilana Masad discusses Beings with Scott Guild

About the Book:

In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. Unintentionally, a genre was born: the alien abduction narrative.

In Ilana Masad's Beings, the couple's experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads: Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Masad explores the pair's trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness, and alienation in the repressive 1960s-as well as the joy of finding community. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis's letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

Over the course of a decade, Phyllis wrestles with her desires and ambitions as a lesbian writer, while the abducted couple grapple with how to maintain control of their narrative. All the while, the archive shatters and reforms, redefining fact and fiction via the stories left behind by the abductees, Phyllis, and the Archivist themself. Masad makes human what is alien and makes tangible what is hidden – sometimes by chance and sometimes intentionally – in the archive.

About the Authors:

Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism whose work has been widely published. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother's Lovers and is co-editing the forthcoming anthology Here For All the Reasons: Why We Watch The Bachelor.

Scott Guild is the author of the novel Plastic (Pantheon), a Best Book of the Year in Scientific American, Our Culture, Locus, and other venues. His work has also appeared in TIME, NPR, Literary Hub, and many more. He is a professor of Literature at Marian University in Indianapolis, and also teaches at Indiana Women’s Prison.