Rental Partner: Neighborhood House Washington presents
Susan Choi with John Whittier Treat
New Novel 'Flashlight' Illuminates Past, Present, and Politics
Note: Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM.
The discovery of a family secret can add layers to any story; likewise, when a character questions her own memories or when others around her doubt those memories or make attempts at gaslighting. Add to that mixture a healthy pull between familial and national allegiance. Whether or not your real life background is fraught with these types of conflict or uncertainty, you might be a reader who enjoys escaping in the pages of stories that tackle such issues.
Novelist Susan Choi’s 2019 coming-of-age book Trust Exercise won the National Book Award for fiction. She returns to discuss her latest release, Flashlight, which has already been hailed as a “Most Anticipated Book of the Year” by various outlets.
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Choi’s chapters shift through different characters’ perspectives, tracing a father’s mysterious disappearance across time, nations, and memory. The story flows from a walk on the beach and journeys through things like family catastrophe, tension between past and present, cultural belonging, and generational geopolitics from Japan to North Korea. Complicated family dynamics surround the narrative as readers try to uncover what happened and how to make sense of life and love.
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.
John Whittier Treat is Emeritus Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale. His novels, all set in the Pacific Northwest, include The Rise and Fall of the Yellow House (2015), First Consonants (2022), and the forthcoming The Seventh City of Refuge.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle.
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