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KAMILA SHAMSIE
Thursday, September 2nd at 7 pm
Burnt Shadows
 The Village Voice Bookshop & Les Editions Buchet/Chastel have the pleasure of inviting you to meet Kamila Shamsie read from and discuss her novel, Burnt Shadows.
Shamsie's fifth novel follows the interconnected lives of two families brought together in Nagasaki near the end of World War II. It's an engrossing story of resilience and humanity in the face of crushing tragedy.
“Kamila Shamsie is a writer of immense ambition and strength. She understands a great deal about the ways in which the world’s many tragedies and histories shape one another, and about how human beings can try to avoid being crushed by their fate and can discover their humanity, even in the fiercest combat zones of the age. Burnt Shadows is an absorbing novel that commands, in the reader, a powerful emotional and intellectual response.” — Salman Rushdie
Kamila Shamsie was born in 1973 in Karachi. She has studied and taught in the United States. Two of her previous novels, Kartography and Broken Verses, have won awards from Pakistan's Academy of Letters. She writes for The Guardian (UK) and frequently broadcasts on the BBC.
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ETHAN CANIN & ALEKSANDAR HEMON
Thursday September 23rd
To launch Festival America
 To launch Festival America, two authors, Ethan Canin & Aleksandar Hemon, will present their latest novels. Don't miss this special event.
Ethan Canin will read from and discuss America America. Ethan Canin’s stunning novel is about America as it was and is, a remarkable exploration of how vanity, greatness, and tragedy combine to change history and fate. Ethan Canin is the author of six books, including the story collections Emperor of the Air and The Palace Thief and the novels For Kings and Planets and Carry Me Across the Water. He is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and divides his time between Iowa and northern Michigan. He is also a physician.
 Aleksandar Hemon will read from and discuss The Lazarus Project. This stunning novel begins with the story of nineteen-year-old Lazarus Averbuch, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant, who was shot to death on the doorstep of the Chicago chief of police and cast as a would-be anarchist assassin. A century later, a young Eastern European writer in Chicago named Brik becomes obsessed with Lazarus's story. Brik enlists his friend Rora - a war photographer from Sarajevo - to join him in retracing Averbuch's path. Through a history of pogroms and poverty, and a prism of a present-day landscape of cheap mafiosi and even cheaper prostitutes, the stories of Averbuch and Brik become inextricably intertwined, creating a truly original, provocative, and entertaining novel that confirms Aleksandar Hemon as one of the most dynamic and essential literary voices of our time. The Lazarus Project was Shortlisted for the National Book Award in 2008.
Born in Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon came to Chicago in 1992. The author of the acclaimed Nowhere Man and The Question of Bruno, he writes stories and essays that appear regularly in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories.
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