Join us to celebrate two brilliant novels by two brilliant writers: Don't Be A Stranger by Susan Minot and I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore, recently out in paperback. These longtime friends will discuss their recent work, focusing on the theme of "love and not letting go." The evening will be moderated by Emmeline Clein. 

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About Don't Be A Stranger: A mesmerizing new novel from the author of Evening: the story of a woman swept into a love affair at mid-life.

Ivy Cooper is 52 years old when Ansel Fleming first walks into her life. Twenty years her junior, a musician newly released from prison on a minor drug charge, Ansel’s beguiling good looks and quiet intensity instantly seduce her. Despite the gulf between their ages and experience the physical chemistry between them is overpowering, and over the heady weeks and months that follow Ivy finds her life bifurcated by his presence: On the surface she is a responsible mother, managing the demands of friends, an ex-husband, home; but emotionally, psychologically, sexually, she is consumed by desire and increasingly alive only in the stolen moments-out-of-time, with Ansel in her bed.

In spellbinding prose, Susan Minot has crafted a luminous novel about erotic obsession, and the hunger for intimacy, communication, oblivion. Don't Be a Stranger is a gripping, sensual, and provocative work from one of the most remarkable voices in contemporary fiction.

“Susan Minot’s writing is like a diamond knife on ice. Always has been.” —Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

About I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home: Winner of the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Best book of Fiction. Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs is a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart.

With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life.  Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes us through a trap door, into a windswept, imagined journey to the tragic-comic landscape that is, unmistakably, the world of Lorrie Moore.

“An exquisite exploration of grief, longing, and our relationship with the past . . . mixing comedy with tragedy, and exploring what it means to be alive.” —Kristyn Kusek Lewis, Real Simple

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Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, and screenwriter. Her first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and won the Prix Femina Étranger in France. Her novel Evening was a worldwide best seller and became a major motion picture. She lives with her daughter in New York City and on an island off the coast of Maine.

 

 

 

Lorrie Moore is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, as well as the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award for her achievement in the short story. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

 

Emmeline Clein is the author of Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm (Knopf, 2024) and Toxic (Choo Choo Press, 2024). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, The Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere.

 

 

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