You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories—Kristen Roupenian with Deborah Treisman

The delights and horrors of womanhood.

When “Cat Person” appeared in the New Yorker in December 2017 it quickly took Book Twitter by storm. The short story centers on a young woman's experience dating in a sleepy college town, but with decidedly skin-crawling twists. You Know You Want This is Kristen Roupenian's highly anticipated debut collection of stories that explore the ways in which women are horrifying as much as it captures the horrors that are done to them. Spanning a range of topics and genres, it is darkly funny, delightfully cringeworthy, and compulsively readable.

Kristen Roupenian graduated from Barnard and holds a PhD in African Literature from Harvard. She is a Zell Fellow in the University of Michigan MFA program, and she has received numerous awards for her work.

Mid-Sentence presents a series of conversations with groundbreaking literary voices. Indie authors and cult favorites explore the intersections between literature and lived experience.

ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.