Fiction as Millennial Cultural Critique: Two Debut Authors in Conversation
Abigail Savitch-Lew and Daniel Pope
Please join us as we unravel the themes connecting these two very different novels. Includes wine reception, audience Q&A, and signings.
A double-debut event, featuring Daniel Pope and Abigail Savitch-Lew who will share the spotlight for a book talk exploring millenial angst, fiction as cultural and political critique, and craft strategy.
In the vein of Happiness Falls and Family Lore, Livonia Chow Mein tells a gripping story of family history and political upheaval centered around a Chinese family-owned restaurant in Brownsville, Brooklyn and its impact on the neighborhood’s Jewish and Black residents over the course of a century. Opening, as James McBride (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store) writes, “doors to a Brooklyn world that most of us will never see. She reveals the convergence of cultures that is the real New York to life with flair and grace that make this an utterly enjoyable read.”
In Go Help Yourself we meet Corbin Moore, a twenty-something lapsed writer whose job at a struggling, off-brand spiritualist bookshop in Seattle meshes well with his regimen of smoking cannabis, binge eating, and doom-watching the news. That rut is interrupted by the return of his overbearing mother, Geraldine, a famous self-help guru looking for a guinea pig. Add in the daily deluge of Corbin’s deep-seated insecurities and body dysmorphia, the prospect of reunion with still beloved ex-girlfriend, and nonstop harassment by a murder of near-murderous crows, and you get a person most in need of help—but from whom, and how?
Praise for Livonia Chow Mein
"First-time novelist Savitch-Lew is on a mission in this ardently researched,many-faceted neighborhood saga of immigration, race, desperation, and aspiration...forthright, illuminating, and provocative."— Booklist (starred review)
"This is an indelible story of Brooklyn and the recurring tug-of-war between residents and new arrivals over the right to call the borough home. It’s a tour de force."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Savitch-Lew shows prodigious narrative gifts in this debut novel…A vivid, savory blend of family saga, cultural history, and detective story, rich with urban life and lore."— Kirkus (starred review)
"Abigail Savitch-Lew opens up doors to a Brooklyn world that most of us will never see. She reveals the convergence of cultures that is the real New York to life with flair and grace that make this an utterly enjoyable read."— James McBride, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
"Livonia Chow Mein is a true New York story, a vivid, empathetic portrait of a Brooklyn neighborhood told through four generations of one family. Abigail Savitch-Lew is a generous and gifted storyteller."— Lisa Ko, author of Memory Piece and The Leavers
Abigail Savitch-Lew
is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and an American of Jewish and Chinese (Ashkenazi and Toisanese) descent. She has a BA in literary arts from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Rutgers University-Newark. Her short stories have been published in The Round, Post Road, The Best Teen Writing of 2010, and The Apprentice Writer. Previously, she was a staff reporter for City Limits, an Asian American Writers’ Workshop Margins Fellow, and an adjunct professor of creative writing at Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the artist Emmanuel Knight, her sister-in-law, and their cat.
Daniel Pope
is a writer and musician from Seattle. His debut novel Go Help Yourself is the winner of the University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize. His work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Bellevue Literary Review, Gulf Coast Journal, and elsewhere. He currently lives in the UK, where he is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing.