Zadie Smith will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
A dazzling collection of short fiction. Zadie Smith has established herself as one of the most iconic, critically respected, and popular writers of her generation. In her first short story collection, she combines her power of observation and her inimitable voice to mine the fraught and complex experience of life in the modern world. Interleaving eleven completely new and unpublished stories with some of her best-loved pieces from The New Yorker and elsewhere, Smith presents a dizzyingly rich and varied collection of fiction. Moving exhilaratingly across genres and perspectives, from the historic to the vividly current to the slyly dystopian, Grand Union is a sharply alert and prescient collection about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us.
Nothing is off limits, and everything–when captured by Smith’s brilliant gaze–feels fresh and relevant. Perfectly paced and utterly original, Grand Union highlights the wonders Zadie Smith can do. (Penguin Press)
Zadie Smith is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW, and Swing Time, as well as two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free. Zadie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2002, and was listed as one of Granta‘s 20 Best Young British Novelists in 2003 and again in 2013. White Teeth won multiple literary awards including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. On Beauty was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and NW was shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Zadie Smith is currently a tenured professor of fiction at New York University and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the academic books Race and Resistance and Nothing Ever Dies. He is a cultural critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times and teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
826LA is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their creative and expository writing skills, and to helping teachers inspire their students to write. For more information, please visit WWW.826LA.ORG.
This ticketed event will take place at First Congregational Church of Los Angeles located at 540 South Commonwealth Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90020.
Tickets, now available on Eventbrite:
General admission (Ticket + book): $32.00 (+tax)
Ticket includes one entry and one copy of Grand Union: Stories, to be handed out at check in the night of the event. Book signing to follow the talk.
If there are any questions please call Book Soup at (310) 659-3110 or visit us at www.booksoup.com
Event date: Thursday, October 17, 2019 – 7:00pm
Event address: First Congregational Church of Los Angeles, 540 South Commonwealth Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90020
