Reading & Convo: Larissa Pham "Discipline" (w/ Santiago Jose Sanchez)

Pop Song, Larissa Pham's book of essays on art and intimacy, was a staff fave at White Whale and made us want to live inside Pham's brilliant mind and read everything she put into print from then on. Her debut novel, Discipline, is just as stunning, and treads Pham's familiar themes of obsession, intimacy, and art. We're so excited to host Pham in store for this buzzy new release, along with Santiago Jose Sanchez, Pittsburgher and author of Hombrecito—which was also a staff pick! Sure to be a great night of fiction and craft talk!

ABOUT THE BOOK:

A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from “a writer to keep a close eye on” —The New York Times Book Review
“Precise and spellbinding . . . That knotty relationship, as propulsive as it is maddening, forces the reader to wonder: How do you separate your art from the people—and painful experiences—that helped to forge it?”—Vogue
A BEST BOOK OF THE SEASON: Bustle, Debutiful, Harper's Bazaar
I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. Yet I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow.
Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, she’s seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers, and friends.
But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her that he’s read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his house, on a remote island off the coast of Maine, their encounter threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she’s imagined it.
A pristine and provocative high-wire act toggling the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive and the possibilities that lie beyond them, Discipline launches a spellbinding inquiry into the nature of art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

LARISSA PHAM is the author of Discipline, a novel, and the essay collection Pop Song, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. She's written essays and criticism for outlets including the Nation, Aperture, Art in America, and Granta, and she is an assistant professor of writing nonfiction at the New School.

SANTIAGO JOSE SANCHEZ (they/them), a Grinnell College assistant professor of English and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is a queer Colombian American writer. Santiago’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, ZYZZYVA, Subtropics, and Joyland and been distinguished in Best American Short Stories. They are the recipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship from the University of Iowa and an Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellowship from Lambda Literary.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher White Whale Bookstore