Past, present, and future collide in stories about confronting the past and facing consequences.

In The Night Always Comes, award-winning author Willy Vlautin explores the impact of trickle-down greed and opportunism of gentrification on ordinary lives in this scorching novel that captures the plight of a young woman pushed to the edge as she fights to secure a stable future for herself and her family. A heart-wrenching portrait of a woman hungry for security and a home in a rapidly changing city, The Night Always Comes raises the difficult questions we are often too afraid to ask ourselves: What is the price of gentrification, and how far are we really prepared to go to achieve the American Dream? Is the American dream even attainable for those living at the edges? Or for too many of us, is it only a hollow promise?

“Both stamped in time and timeless,” Aimee Bender said of  Stacy D. Flood‘s novella The Salt Fields. On the day that Minister Peters boards a train from South Carolina heading north, he has nothing left but ghosts: the ghost of his murdered wife, the ghost of his drowned daughter, the ghosts of his father and his grandmother and the people who disappeared from his town without trace or explanation. In the cramped car, Minister finds himself in close quarters with three passengers also joining the exodus from the South—people seeking a new life, whose motives, declared or otherwise, will change Minister’s life with devastating consequences.

Moderated by Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot.