Breka Blakeslee publishes Probably It Will Not Be Okay

IAS alum Breka Blakeslee (MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics, '15) has published their debut novel, Probably It Will Not Be Okay, which began its life as the author's MFA thesis. From the publisher's page:

"Probably It Will Not Be Okay takes place at the end of the anthropocene. People and animals, what's left of them, share the ruins of a human city, a benign surveillance democracy where curfews and protests are compulsory. N & J, a couple fond of whiskey, cigarettes, and breaking into abandoned buildings, must bury their dead dog and raise a baby that appears in their house. Fleeing hazy fears, N & J drive away from the city as far as a car can take them, bringing the baby and the decaying dog through a series of misadventures that ends by a fence at the edge of surveillance. They and the baby crawl under the fence — and then the book reverses itself, like a movie run backward, to tell the story of Dog, a young person who climbs back under the fence with a talking sloth, tracing a route back to "the first home" and the sloth's destiny.

Probably It Will Not Be Okay is a strange, beguiling palindrome of a book with an ending unlike any other in fiction, an ending that is also the beginning of hope and optimism."