Join us on Friday, December 4th at 7pm as we welcome Carolyn Huynh and Hieu Minh Nguyen to the shop for the release of Fetal Position! This event will be moderated by Kathy L. Nguyen and presented with DVAN. Save the date! RSVP is not required, but appreciated. Seats are first come, first served and can be guaranteed with the purchase of a book or a $3 sliding scale donation to our program.

About the book

Like a Black Mirror episode that feels all too terrifyingly real, this speculative novel from the author of the Good Morning America Book Club pick The Fortunes of Jaded Women follows a burnt-out corporate employee who joins a start-up that promises domestic ease—but as women begin to disappear, she must confront the violent cost of complicity.

In a near future plagued by plummeting birthrates and a male loneliness epidemic, a mysterious start-up called Hatch recruits “high-value” women with a seductive promise: trade your grueling work life for subsidized security, a beautiful home, and a robotic butler to handle every domestic burden.

You simply trade in your corporate labor for child labor—through being inseminated with a male match’s sperm.

Lena Do is one of those women. She’s been stuck in corporate America for far too long. She hates her life. She has no nuclear family, no cousins, and no support system. The world is shrinking, and it’s not just the men who are lonely.

So when she receives an invitation to Hatch, she’s wooed by their promises of connection and happiness. But the pristine, utopian facade begins to crack when the women around her vanish, and has no choice but to race against the clock to uncover the truth behind the company before she’s trapped forever—all the while trying to discern whose side her robot butler is really on.11

With biting social critique, Fetal Position examines survival, complicity, artificial life, bodily autonomy, and the chilling reality of an increasingly data-driven world that optimizes who deserves love—and who deserves to live.

About the author

Carolyn Huynh is a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright. She loves writing about acerbic women who never learn from their mistakes but yearn for joy. Her debut novel, The Fortunes of Jaded Women, was a Good Morning America book club pick and picked as one of the best books of the year by NPR. A homegrown Californian, she resides in Los Angeles with her partner, her daughter, and her demon girl dog. Fetal Position is her third book. When she’s not writing, Carolyn daydreams about having iced coffee on a rooftop in Ho Chi Minh City.

Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of three poetry collections, including Staying Still (Tin House Books, 2026), This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018), which won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. His honors include the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a McKnight Writing Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He earned his MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from the Twin Cities, Hieu lives in Oakland and is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

Website: https://www.hieuminhnguyen.com/

IG: hieuminhbeing

Kathy L. Nguyễn is a writer, editor and Co-Executive Director of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), a literary arts nonprofit based in San Francisco. She co-edited Troubling Borders: An Anthology of Art and Literature by Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora and was the editor of Nhà, an award-winning Vietnamese diasporic arts & culture magazine. Her editing credits also include This Is All I Choose To Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature and Once Upon A Dream: The Vietnamese-American Experience. Her work appears on NPR, KQED, and KALW, and in print in Fourteen Hills, Fringe, Women’s World, diaCRITICS, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and an MA in Asian Studies from the East-West Center, University of Hawai’i. Kathy is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Hedgebrook, Vashon Artists Residency, Tin House, and the Community of Writers.

IG: katz_nguyen

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.

Please note:

• Check-in for the event will begin at 6:45pm.
• Priced ticket holders (Book+seat, Pay it Forward!+seat) will have seats held until 7pm. Arrivals after 7pm will be allowed admission, but seats are not guaranteed.
• General admission ticket holders will be offered seats at check-in on a first-come, first-served basis. May be standing room.
• Space at the door on the day of the event is usually available, but not guaranteed.
• Books will be for sale on the night of the event.
• ADA accessible. Bathrooms on site during event hours.
• Events typically end between 8:30 and 9pm.
• Questions? tickets@booksmith.com