Harvard Book Store and the Cambridge Public Library welcome Susan Choi—author of Nation Book Award-winning novel Trust Exercise—for a discussion of her new book Flashlight, a novel tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory. She will be joined in conversation by Gish Jen—acclaimed author of Thank You, Mr. Nixon and The Resisters.
Ticketing
RSVP for free to this event or choose the "Book-Included" ticket to reserve a copy of Flashlight and pick it up at the event. Susan Choi will sign copies of her book after the presentation.
Note: Books bundled with tickets may only be picked up at the venue the night of the event, and cannot be picked up in-store beforehand. Ticket holders who purchased a book-included ticket and are unable to attend the event will be able to pick up their book at Harvard Book Store up to 30 days following the event. This offer expires after 30 days. Please note we cannot guarantee signed copies will be available to ticket holders who do not attend the event.
About Flashlight
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi's Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?
Bios
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
Gish Jen's short stories have been included in The Best American Short Stories five times, including in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. A fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, she has been the recipient of a Lannan Literary Award as well as a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award. She has also been awarded NEA, Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Radcliffe fellowships, and delivered the William E. Massey lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard in 2012. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and many anthologies and textbooks. Her most recent book is a collection of stories spanning the 50 years since the opening of China to the West, entitled Thank You, Mr. Nixon, and has an autobiographical novel coming out this October, entitled Bad Bad Girl (Knopf).
Masking Policy
Masks are encouraged but not required for this event.
