The New Salon: Fiction Writers in Conversation
Fiction readings by Lydia Davis and Isabella Hammad, and a conversation with Darin Strauss, followed by a reception/signing.
Open to the public. All attendees are required to RSVP in advance; please click here.
***
While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters, they stay home if they feel sick, and masks are always welcome.
***
The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House is not currently wheelchair accessible.
***
Lydia Davis is the author of Our Strangers: Stories, which delves into topics ranging from marriage to tiny insects, a celebration of language and careful observation. She is also the author of Essays One, Essays Two, The End of the Story: A Novel and many story collections, including Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction; Can’t and Won’t (2014); and The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, described by James Wood in The New Yorker as “a grand cumulative achievement.” Davis is also the acclaimed translator of Swann’s Way and Madame Bovary, both awarded the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and of many other works of literature. She has been named both a Chevalier and an Officier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government, and in 2020 she received the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
Photo by Theo Cote
Isabella Hammad is the author of the critically acclaimed novel The Parisian (Grove Press, 2019), which won the 2019 Palestine Book Award. She was a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, and the debut was praised by the New York Times Book Review as a “dazzling…deeply-imagined historical novel.” A love story set amidst the political tumult of Palestine in the early 20th century, The Parisian was awarded the the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award from the Society of Authors in the UK, and the Plimpton Prize. In 2023, Grove Atlantic published Enter Ghost, a bold, evocative story that follows actress Sonia as she returns to Palestine and takes a role in a West Bank production of Hamlet. Of Hammad’s much anticipated second book, Leila Aboulela says: “Aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally and culturally satisfying. It is astonishing but true that Isabella Hammad is incapable of striking a false note. She immerses her heroine in volatile territory with the accuracy, compassion and coolness of a surgical knife sliding into a diseased body. The result is a stunning beauty — an eye-opening, uplifting novel that grants its vulnerable cast and their endeavors a rare and graceful dignity.” Her writing has appeared in Conjunctions, The Paris Review, The New York Times and elsewhere. Her story “Mr. Can’aan” won the 2019 O. Henry Prize and the 2018 Plimpton Prize for Fiction. Born in London, Hammad obtained her undergraduate degree in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. In 2020 she received a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction, in 2012 she was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard GSAS, and in 2013 she received the Harper Wood Creative Writing Studentship from Cambridge University. During her MFA in Fiction at New York University she was a Stein Fellow, and she was the 2016-2017 Axinn Foundation NYU Writer-in-Residence.
Photo by Kathy Coulter
Darin Strauss is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than it Hurts You, the memoir Half a Life, and most recently the acclaimed novel, The Queen of Tuesday : A Lucille Ball Story (Random House, 2020). Strauss is the recipient of a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim, an American Library Association Award, and numerous other prizes. His books have been named New York Times Notable Books, Entertainment Weekly Must Books of the Year, and Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year, among others. He teaches at New York University.
Photo by Robert Bernbaum