Readings from Three Novels

Myla Goldberg is the author of The False Friend, Wickett’s Remedy, and Bee Season, which was a New York Times Notable Book, a winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, and was adapted to film and widely translated. Her first book in nearly a decade, Feast Your Eyes (Scribner), is a compelling and wholly original story about a female photographer grappling with ambition and motherhood, a balancing act familiar to women of every generation. Feast Your Eyes, framed as the catalogue notes from a photography show at the Museum of Modern Art, tells the life story of Lillian Preston: “America’s Worst Mother, America’s Bravest Mother, America’s Worst Photographer, or America’s Greatest Photographer, depending on who was talking.” After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school’s photo club, Lillian rejects her parents’ expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter’s sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian’s career as she continues a life-long quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, an international bestseller, and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, and the novels The Ministry of Special Cases and Dinner at the Center of the Earth.  He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Frank O'Connor Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. He is Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. In kaddish.com: A novel (Knopf) the celebrated Pulitzer finalist and prize-winning author delivers a streamlined comic masterpiece about a son’s failure to say Kaddish for his father. Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews.  When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months.  To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father’s soul.  To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest. Sharp, irreverent, hilarious, and wholly irresistible, Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise ingeniously captures the tensions between tradition and modernity—a book to be devoured in a single sitting whose pleasures and provocations will be savored long after.

Tea Obreht is the New York Times bestselling author of The Tiger’s Wife, which also won the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. Born in the former Yugoslavia, and now a resident of New York, her work has appeared in publications such as The Best American Short Stories, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s Magazine. Set in the lawless, drought-ridden lands of the Arizona Territory in 1893, Tea Obreht’s new novel, Inland (Random House), tells the story of two characters whose lives cross in an improbable way. Nora is an unflinching frontierswoman awaiting the return of her husband and her elder sons. Keeping her company is her youngest son, who is convinced that a mysterious beast is stalking the land around their home. The other character is Lurie, a former outlaw haunted by ghosts. He is in a death-defying trek across the West that at one point, intersects with Nora’s plight. Grounded in true but little-known history, Inland subverts and reimagines the myths of the American West. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called Inland “A frontier tale [that] dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet. [Obreht] returns with a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin.”