Fall Roundup

This is a picture of me in my light-filled office at the Radcliffe Institute, where I’ve been working on my new novel these last few months. The weather has started to cool, and we’ve already had a sprinkling of snow, so I’m going to take advantage of the winter break to return to the California desert for a few weeks. But I wanted to post a few updates here before I forget.

I reviewed two books that were recently published in English translation: Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men for The Washington Post and Chantal Montellier’s graphic novel Social Fiction for The Nation. I miss writing about books, and I hope to be able to do more of it in the new year.

It was a delight to hear that Time magazine selected The Other Americans as one of its 100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time, alongside works by masters of the genre (Patricia Highsmith! Raymond Chandler! Chester Himes!) and contemporary authors, many of them dear friends.

This fall, I was in conversation with Viet Thanh Nguyen for the second of his Norton lectures at Harvard, “On Speaking as an Other.” If you’re interested, you can watch the lecture and convo in full here. I also served as a table host for the Words Without Borders annual gala. WWB is a wonderful organization that promotes global literature, and is often the first to publish international writers in the United States. There was a nice write-up about the event in the New York Times.

As always, you can keep up with my work through Instagram and BlueSky (and Twitter, for however long it lasts). You can also check out my events page for public readings and talks.