On the Joys of Literary Community

Come celebrate the paperback publications of Clare Beams’s The Garden, Xochitl

Gonzalez’s Anita de Monte Laughs Last, Crystal Hana Kim’s The Stone Home, and Lisa

Ko’s Memory Piece. The authors will discuss the importance of literary community, the anxieties and joys of publishing a second novel, and more.

Clare Beams is the author of the novels The Garden (Doubleday, 2024) and The Illness

Lesson (Doubleday, 2020), both New York Times Editors’ Choices, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books 2016), which won the Bard Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Conjunctions, Ecotone, McSweeney's, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates/New Literary Project Prize. She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Randolph College.

Xochitl Gonzalez is the New York Times bestselling author of Anita de Monte Laughs Last, a

Reese’s Book Club Pick longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and the award-winning novel Olga Dies Dreaming, named a Best of 2022 by The New York Times,

TIME, Kirkus, Washington Post, and NPR. She is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where she was recognized as a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Commentary.

Crystal Hana Kim is the author of the critically acclaimed novels The Stone Home (2024), a finalist for the Maya Angelou Book Prize and current longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Award, and If You Leave Me (2018), which was named a best book of 2018 by over a dozen publications. Kim is the recipient of the 2022 National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and the winner of a 2017 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her family.

Lisa Ko is the author of the new novel Memory Piece and the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s writing has ppeared in Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, and The Believer.

Host or Publisher Liz’s Book Bar