Celebrate the release of Defekt with a reading and conversation with Nino Cipri and Premee Mohamed!

Find out if five Dereks are better than one in the sequel to Finna, the surrealist world-hopping adventure that was one of the most anticipated novellas of Winter 2020.

Derek is LitenVärld's most loyal employee. He lives and breathes the job, from the moment he wakes up in a converted shipping container at the edge of the parking lot to the second he clocks out of work 18 hours later. But after taking his first ever sick day, his manager calls that loyalty into question. An excellent employee like Derek, an employee made to work at LitenVärld, shouldn't need time off.

To test his commitment to the job, Derek is assigned to a special inventory shift, hunting through the store to find defective products. Toy chests with pincers and eye stalks, ambulatory sleeper sofas, killer mutant toilets, that kind of thing. Helping him is the inventory team — four strangers who look and sound almost exactly like him. Are five Dereks better than one?

Nino Cipri is a queer and trans/nonbinary writer, editor, and educator. They are a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, and earned their MFA in fiction from the University of Kansas in 2019. A multidisciplinary artist, Nino has also written plays, screenplays, and radio features; performed as a dancer, actor, and puppeteer; and worked as a stagehand, bookseller, bike mechanic, and labor organizer.

One time, an angry person on the internet called Nino a verbal terrorist, which was pretty funny.

Nino’s 2019 story collection Homesick won the Dzanc Short Fiction Collection Prize, and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy Award. Their novella Finna — about queer heartbreak, working retail, and wormholes — was published by Tor.com, and its sequel Defekt will be out in April 2021.

Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and speculative fiction author based in Edmonton, Alberta. Her debut novel, 'Beneath the Rising,' came out from Solaris Books in 2020, with the sequel 'A Broken Darkness' due out in 2021. Other books coming out in 2021 include 'These Lifeless Things' (Solaris), 'And What Can We Offer You Tonight' (Neon Hemlock) and 'The Annual Migration of Clouds' (ECW Press). Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Analog, Escape Pod, Augur, and Nightmare Magazine. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus and on her website at www.premeemohamed.com.

Nino Cipri in conversation with Premee Mohamed