There’s no better plans you could make for this Friday night – don’t miss this wonderful conversation between Madeline ffitch and Seattle-based novelist and memoirist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

Stay and Fight is ffitch’s debut novel – it’s gathered immense critical acclaim and is a bookseller favorite here at Ravenna Third Place Books.

An Indie Next Selection
A Most Anticipated Book of July at The New York Times
A Book to Read in July at debutiful and A. V. Club
A Publishers Weekly Book of the Week

“Like Bastard Out of Carolina, ffitch’s electrifying debut novel is a paean to independence and a protest against the materialism of our age.”
–O: The Oprah Magazine

Set in a region known for its independent spirit, Stay and Fight shakes up what it means to be a family, to live well, to make peace with nature and make deals with the system. It is a protest novel that challenges our notions of effective action. It is a family novel that refuses to limit the term. And it is a marvel of storytelling that both breaks with tradition and celebrates it. Best of all, it is full of flawed, cantankerous, flesh-and-blood characters who remind us that conflict isn’t the end of love, but the real beginning.

Absorbingly spun, perfectly voiced, and disruptively political, Madeline ffitch’s Stay and Fight forces us to reimagine an Appalachia–and an America–we think we know. And it takes us, laughing and fighting, into a new understanding of what it means to love and to be free.

Madeline ffitch cofounded the punk theater company Missoula Oblongata and is part of the direct-action collective Appalachia Resist! Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Guernica, Granta, VICE, and Electric Literature, among other publications. She is the author of the story collection Valparaiso, Round the Horn. Stay and Fight is her first novel.

Described as “startlingly bold and provocative” by Howard Zinn, “a cross between Tinkerbell and a honky Malcolm X with a queer agenda” by the Austin Chronicle, and “a gender-fucking tower of pure pulsing purple fabulous” by The Stranger, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the author of a memoir and three novels, and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies. Her latest title is a novel, Sketchtasy (Arsenal Pulp Press 2018). Sarah Schulman says, “If Sketchtasy doesn’t become a classic, we are doomed.”