If you’re looking to escape the smog and hot garbage of summer in the city, or just the (spiritual) smog and (emotional) hot garbage of adulthood, consider Annie DeWitt‘s debut novel your vicarious getaway. White Nights in Split Town City is set during those halcyon days of the early Nineties in a New England town so small the roads are dirt. With the stylized prose of an author who understands how one phrase can trigger an entire memory, DeWitt captures the uncertainty of those summer stretches between girlhood and teenagedom, when you’re suddenly old enough to know what you want but still too young to reach out and take it. Her heroine, Jean, is incredibly observant for a twelve-year-old, barely containing her own restlessness as she resolves to seduce the local bad boy and an elderly neighbor. Tonight DeWitt joins Sam Lipsyte (Home Land, The Ask) to discuss her daring and cautionary coming-of-age story.