Town Hall Seattle presents
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor with Mayor Katie Wilson
End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World
Town Hall Seattle and Seattle Public Library present
Valeria Luiselli
Beginning Middle End: A Novel
EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
Valeria Luiselli, award-winning author of the modern classics Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends, shares her newest novel, Beginning Middle End, the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story.
This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip through Sicily. The narrator’s marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. Their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past.
Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island’s migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel confront some of life’s primary questions: How do stories shape our children’s memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family’s memories made and what happens when they disappear?
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Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Folio Prize, and the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She teaches at Harvard University and Bard College. She lives in New York City.
Presented by Town Hall Seattle and Seattle Public Library.
Events are offered for informational, entertainment, and educational purposes only. Read Town Hall’s Program Content Policy.
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