Books in Common welcomes rising literary star Ethan Rutherford's to share his fevered new short story collection, Farthest South, which pulls together eight stories about family and home that are at the same time fevered, personal, and explicitly engaged with their own telling. Author Paul Yoon will be joining Rutherford for an engrossing conversation you won't want to miss.

A baby is born with gills. Foxes raise and then lose a human child. A man, in the final throes of his deathbed fever dream, experiences a cross-Antarctic voyage. In each of the finely tuned and deeply affecting stories collected in Farthest South, parental bonds and the possibilities of family happiness are tested, and commingle with something darker. These are narratives of familial love and tenderness, sung in an anxious and thrilling key.

Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Post Road, Esopus, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. His first book, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children.

Paul Yoon is the author of two story collections, Once the Shore, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and The Mountain, which was a NPR Best Book of the Year. His novel Snow Hunters won the Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars and the National Endowment for the Arts, he lives in Sanford, Florida, with his wife, the fiction writer Laura van den Berg, and their dog, Oscar.