Valeria Luiselli is the author of the internationally acclaimed novel Faces in the Crowd (2012), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction, and The Story of My Teeth (2015), and the collection of essays Sidewalks (2014). She is a rising literay star whose work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, andMcSweeney’s. In 2014 she won the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. Born in Mexico City in 1983, she grew up in South Africa. (more…)

Hyeonseo Lee is a North Korean defector living in Seoul. Her memoir, The Girl With Seven Names, has been published in more than 20 countries “I’m telling them about the girl who grew up believing her nation to be the greatest on earth, and who witnessed her first public execution at the age of seven,” Lee writes. Over 5 million people have viewed her TED Talk about her life in North Korea, her escape to China, and struggle to bring her family to freedom. Lee has given testimony about North Korean human rights in front of a special panel of the UN Security Council, and has discussed issues with important leaders such as UN Ambassador Samantha Powers. (more…)

We knew Hyeonseo Lee’s solo talk was going to be a hot ticket, but we didn’t quite expect it to sell out within two weeks. In the weeks since, the wait list has steadily expanded, to the point where we had to do this: give her a second solo. So this Sunday, March 27 at 6 pm, Hyeonseo Lee will be giving an encore to her book talk, The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story. Tickets are now available both online and at The Bookworm. (more…)

Due to a last-minute emergency, Roxane Gay is no longer able to travel to China. She sends her regrets and regards, and says the trip would have been a highlight. Roxane’s solo event on Sunday, March 13 has been cancelled, and we will provide a full refund to everyone who purchased a ticket to this event. The panel discussion she was scheduled to appear at on Tuesday, March 15, Voices from the Margins, will go on as planned with Xiao Meili and He Xiaopei speaking with Emily Rauhala, but we will also offer a full refund to those who request it. (more…)

Jess Row is the author of two short story collections — The Train to Lo Wu andNobody Ever Gets Lost — and the novel Your Face in Mine. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Ploughshares, Granta,American Short Fiction, Harvard Review, etc., have been anthologized three times inThe Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award, among other prizes. In 2007 he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. He is currently teaching at The College of New Jersey and is a faculty member of the MFA program at the City University of Hong Kong. (more…)

With International Women’s Day (March 8) in mind, Read Paper Republic has selected four short stories from China that focus on highly charged issues such as sexual freedom, political disappearances, “leftover” women, and compromising situations. A woman trapped in a loveless marriage has an awkward, but ultimately empowering, one-night stand. A wife comes home to find her husband has disappeared, or rather “been disappeared.” The colleagues of a career woman apply their engineering expertise to the intractable problem of finding her a worthy husband. A young woman refuses to sleep with her boss, with catastrophic consequences for her family. (more…)

Our first event is at 1 pm with Agnes Desarthe, with the Opening Ceremony at 8 pm. Multiple events every day from now until March 27. Happy festivalling!

We have five terrific French-speaking authors at this year’s Bookworm Literary Festival, and three French-language events. It all begins tomorrow at 1 pm, when Agnes Desarthe speaks with reporter Becky Davis about women in literature. Check out what else is in store: (more…)

Mariko Nagai is a much-awarded poet and author, a recipient of the Pushcart Prize in both poetry and fiction, and the most recent winner of the Les Figues Press NOS Book Contest for her forthcoming novel Irradiated Cities. Her collection of poems, Histories of Bodies, won the Benjamin Saltman Prize from Red Hen Press, and her first collection of stories,Georgic: Stories, won the 2009 G.S. Sharat Chandra Fiction Prize from BkMk Press. Her other books include the poetry collection Instructions for the Living and novel Dust of Eden, which we review below. Nagai was born in Tokyo and raised in Europe and America. (more…)

In Andy McGuire’s poetry, we are bombarded with images, from birds to Floridians, mosquitoes to beaches underneath boardwalks. Readers must duck and weave, eluding their sharp edges and simultaneously hoping to catch them like raindrops. McGuire’s poems have appeared in Riddle Fence, Hazlitt, and The Walrus. He earned the right to appear at the Bookworm Literary Festival after winning the first-ever Poetry Games held at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. (more…)