About this Event
In converastion with Susan is Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan.
This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.
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ACCESSIBILITY:
Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.
ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by Jun 3 to request.
Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.
For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact [email protected]
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The “first major American novel” of the year (The Wall Street Journal), from the National Book Award–winning author of Trust Exercise, Susan Choi’s Flashlight traces a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory.
One summer night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the breakwater. Her father is carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later, Louisa is found on the beach, soaked to the skin, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, is Korean, but was born and raised in Japan; he lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to North Korea. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her Midwestern family. But now it is just Anne and Louisa, adrift and facing the challenges of ordinary life in the wake of great loss. United, separated, and also repelled by their mutual grief, they attempt to move on. But they cannot escape the echoes of that night. What really happened to Louisa’s father?
A monumental novel from the National Book Award winner Susan Choi, Flashlight spans decades and continents in a spellbinding, heart-gripping investigation of family, loss, memory, and the ways in which we are shaped by what we cannot see.
Photo credit: Paul Myers
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for Fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Jennifer Egan is the author of several novels and a short story collection. Her 2017
novel, Manhattan Beach, a New York Times bestseller, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie
Medal for Excellence in Fiction and was chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York
read. Her previous novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the
National Book Critics Circle Award, and was recently named one of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. Her new novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. She has served as President of PEN America and twice as Artist-in-Residence in the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught courses in 19th and 20th Century literature. Her year-long reporting on street homelessness and supportive housing in New York City was published in The New Yorker in September of 2023.
Photo: Pieter M.Van Hattem
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, New York, United States
USD 13.61 to USD 24.06
