Fiction: A Reading

Janet Fitch's first novel, White Oleander, a #1 bestseller and Oprah's Book Club selection, has been translated into twenty-eight languages and was made into a feature film. Her second novel, Paint It Black, hit bestseller lists across the country and has also been made into a film. Her third novel, The Revolution of Marina M., begins an epic journey through the Russian Revolution, which concludes with Chimes of a Lost Cathedral (Little, Brown and Company). The Los Angeles Times calls it, "A Russian fantasy for anyone who's ever dreamed of meeting their heroes, centuries be damned." After the loves and betrayals of The Revolution of Marina M., young poet Marina Makarova finds herself alone amid the devastation of the Russian Civil War--pregnant and adrift, forced to rely on her own resourcefulness to find a place to wait out the birth of her child and eventually make her way back to her native city, Petrograd. Shaped by her country's ordeals and her own trials--betrayal and privation and inconceivable loss--Marina evolves as a poet and a woman of sensibility and substance hardly imaginable at the beginning of her transformative odyssey. Chimes of a Lost Cathedral is the culmination of one woman's s journey through some of the most dramatic events of the last century--the epic story of an artist who discovers her full power, passion, and creativity just as her revolution reveals its true direction for the future.

Nina Revoyr is the author of five previous novels, including The Age of Dreaming, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. First published in 1997 and now reissued, Revoyr’s debut novel The Necessary Hunger (Akashic Books), tells a story about women’s basketball, class, racial identity, and friendship. In her novel A Student of History (Akashic Books), Revoyr explores both, the beginnings of Los Angeles and the present-day dynamics of race and class.

Susan Choi’s is the author of five novels, including, The Foreign Student, which won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, American Woman, a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize, A Person of Interest, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award, and My Education, which received a 2014 Lammy Award. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale. Entertainment Weekly calls her latest book, Trust Exercise: A Novel (Henry Holt and Co.), “a gonzo literary performance.” In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble. Also from Susan Choi, a tiger shows up on a family camping trip in the woods in the children’s book, Camp Tiger (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers).