Lands of Pain and Struggle, with Hannah Lillith Assadi and Darcey Steinke

The reading, conversation, and audience Q&A will be followed by a reception and book signing.

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LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE
“Generations are captured here, loss and pain and miraculous attempt at renewal. A beautiful work.” —Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Chain Gang All-Stars
“Suffused with tenderness.” —The New York Times
All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.
Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.
Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.
Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

"It’s a blessing to live while Darcey Steinke is writing." — Maggie Nelson

"A work of art that could only have emerged from the crucible of truth... absolutely beautiful." — Elizabeth Gilbert

Steinke gets to the heart of pain with her usual brilliance, humor, candor, and empathy. In chapters that trace the body—The Spine, The Heart, The Knees, and more—she introduces sufferers to new and ancient understandings of pain through history, philosophy, religion, pop culture, and reported human experience. Leaving no stone unturned, Steinke takes readers under the knife, through the archives, and across oceans. She interviews working physicians, analyzes the writings of Frida Kahlo, recounts her own back surgery, and journeys to Lourdes, where she finds herself invited to participate in the famed pilgrimage site's rituals.

For readers of Joan Didion, C. S. Lewis, Sheila Heti, and Leslie Jamison, This Is the Door beautifully illuminates the experience of pain and its myriad effects on the body, mind, and soul. Whether you are hurting or know someone who is, whether your pain is somatic or spiritual, This Is the Door is a revelation.

Hannah Lillith Assadi is the author of the Women's Prize long-listed novel Paradiso 17 (Knopf 2026), inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father. Her debut novel Sonora (Soho 2017) received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/ Robert W. Bingham Prize. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells (Riverhead 2022) was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. She is also the co-editor of an anthology of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, which will be published by Everyman’s Library/ Knopf in November 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a '5 under 35' honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Darcey Steinke is most recently the author of the memoir This Is the Door. Her other books include the memoirs Flash Count Diary and Easter Everywhere and five novels. Her books have been translated into ten languages, and many have been New York Times Notables. Her nonfiction has appeared widely and she often writes about art. Her web story "Blindspot" was a part of the 2000 Whitney Biennial. She has been a Henry Hoyns Fellow, a Stegner Fellow, Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi and on the long list of the Independent Book Award and the Arles Author Prize. She has taught at the Columbia University School of the Arts, New York University, Princeton, and the American University of Paris. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA, United States

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