Join Montez Press for the UK launch of The Ginny Suite, the debut novel by Stacy Skolnik. An evening of celebration at iconic venue The Horse Hospital, featuring readings and performances from Stacy Skolnik, artist John Russell, and writers Ella Frears and Sheena Patel.
Doors: 6pm
This event is free but booking is required via the link below. You can also use this link to pre-order a copy of the book for collection on the night.
'Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…'
A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.
Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.
John Russell is an artist who lives and works in London. He has had recent solo exhitions at Kunstverein Zürich (2017), Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York (2021), kölnischer kunstverein (2023), Arcadia Missa, London (2025). He was a co-founder of the artists’ group BANK, of which he was a member for ten years participating in over fifty exhibitions and events, as well as several publications.
Ella Frearsis a poet and artist based in London. Her debut collection, ‘Shine, Darling’, (Offord Road Books, 2020) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. 'Goodlord', her new hybrid work which takes the form of one long email to an estate agent, will be out in June.
Sheena Patel is a writer and assistant director for the film and TV industry. She is part of the 4 BROWN GIRLS WHO WRITE collective and her debut novel 'I'm a Fan' won the Discover Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2023, has been longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Jhalak Prize and finalist in the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Category for the L.A Times Book Prize. It was Foyles Fiction Book of the Year 2022 and an Observer Best Debut Novel of 2022.
The Ginny Suite is formally innovative, a great read. Stacy Skolnik recasts the subject of the internet into telling particulars in her affecting choreography of memes/screens/women/men.
— Constance DeJong, author of Modern Love
The Ginny Suite is a perfect hell of a book: a gossipy stylish mystery that’s both petty and profound. I love how its paranoias and insecurities tip lushly into plot: is the lyric condition of poetry a pathology? Is dissociation a radical response to the lived conditions of patriarchy, or is it patriarchy hacking your brain into submission? What if, instead of self-diagnosing through google, your search history was used to diagnose you, and form the basis of covert treatment? Anyone who’s ever suffered the malady of writing poems will recognise The Ginny Suite’s inability to stop picking these scabs. Its prose moves seamlessly from the lush to the blunt, awash with glitching pronouns, horny ennui, sci-fi intrigue and tender girlish digital fantasies—like if the author of Malina had a dormant Neopets account. I adored it.
— Daisy Lafarge, author of Lovebug
Perversely brilliant, fearlessly inventive, The Ginny Suite beautifully illustrates the horror of being a thinking person inside of a body and culture rushing toward the graveyard.
— Brad Phillips, author of Essays and Fictions
The Ginny Suite proves that Stacy Skolnik is one of the most timely and original voices in post-pandemic New York.
— Joshua Citarella, author of Politigram and the Post-left
A Handmaid’s Tale for the Post-Truth-AI-Surveillance Era.
— Suzanne Treister, author of Hexen 2.0