Join us in celebrating TU President’s Professor and Tulsa Artist Fellow Jennifer Croft and her new book, The Extinction of Irena Ray. From the International Book Prize-winning translator and Women’s Prize finalist, comes an utterly beguiling novel about eight translators and their search for a world-renowned author who goes missing in a primeval Polish forest. Publisher’s Weekly has called it “mirthful,” “energetic,” “wickedly funny,” “absurdly entertaining,” “juicy,” “twisty,” and “poignant.”

Reception with wine and light appetizers to follow.

Croft won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel Amadou (forthcoming from Bloomsbury US and Scribe UK in 2023), the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for her illustrated memoir Homesick (originally written in Spanish in 2014 and published under its original title, Serpientes y escaleras), and the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for her translation of Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. She has also translated Romina Paula’s August, Frederico Falco’s A Perfect Cemetery, Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay, Tina Oziewicz’s What Feelings Do When No One’s Looking, Sylvia Molloy’s Dislocations, Sebastian Martinez Daniell’s Two Sherpas, and Olga Tokarczuk’s Ksiegi Jakubowe (The Books of Jacob). Croft holds a PhD from Northwestern University and an MFA from the University of Iowa.

BOOK DESCRIPTION
Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.

The translators, who hail from eight different countries but share the same reverence for their beloved author, begin to investigate where she may have gone while proceeding with work on her masterpiece. They explore this ancient wooded refuge with its intoxicating slime molds and lichens and study her exotic belongings and layered texts for clues. But doing so reveals secrets-and deceptions-of Irena Rey's that they are utterly unprepared for. Forced to face their differences as they grow increasingly paranoid in this fever dream of isolation and obsession, soon the translators are tangled up in a web of rivalries and desire, threatening not only their work but the fate of their beloved author herself.

This hilarious, thought-provoking debut novel is a brilliant examination of art, celebrity, the natural world, and the power of language. It is an unforgettable, unputdownable adventure with a small but global cast of characters shaken by the shocks of love, destruction, and creation in one of Europe's last great wildernesses.