Meet the Author - Har Mar: Stories by Hilal Isler
About this Event
Light refreshments will be provided. Eventbrite RSVPs help us gauge attendance but are not necessary. Seating and refreshments are first come first served.
In Hilal Isler’s gripping debut story collection, Har Mar, women in the early twenty-first century navigate the complex spaces between countries, families, languages, and selves. Isler’s characters are all on the verge of something—success, rebellion, revelation—and they want to disappear as much as they want to be seen. Moving back and forth between Turkey and the United States, these stories trace migrations both physical and emotional: a nanny plots to flee the wealthy family she cares for in the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul; in Har Mar, a quiet mall tucked in the suburbs of Minneapolis, a bookseller escapes her grief in a complicated relationship with a wig retailer; an actress is hired by a famous American novelist to portray her at public events. The women in Har Mar don’t always make sound decisions, and they’re not trying to be heroes. But they are reaching—imperfectly, but fiercely—for connection, truth, and home. With moving prose and a deep sense of longing, this collection explores what it means to grow up in the margins, to live in translation, and to build a life at the edge of belonging.
HILAL ISLER teaches at the University of Texas. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, New York Magazine, The Believer, The Baltimore Review, The Paris Review online, and elsewhere. She is a 2023 McKnight Fellow in Creative Prose and lives with her family in Austin. Her doctorate is from the University of Pennsylvania.
AMY GENTRY is the author of Good as Gone, Last Woman Standing, Bad Habits, and a book on Tori Amos's Boys for Pele for the 33 1/3 series. Her essays have been published by the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Texas Monthly, and NYRB Classics. She holds a doctorate in English from the University of Chicago and teaches workshops and writing classes in Austin, Texas.
This event is for ages 18 and up.
Meet the Author events provide an opportunity to hear a writer read their work aloud and discuss it with an audience.
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