Famed Brooklyn writer returns with sizzling novel

From Viking/Penguin Group

Brooklyn writer Susan Choi will appear in Brooklyn to read from her new book on July 17 at DUMBO’s powerHouse Arena and on July 30 at Fort Greene’s Greenlight Bookstore. Photo by Adrian Kinloch

According to Brooklyn Eagle, Brooklyn writer Susan Choi, the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award-nominated author of “A Person of Interest” and “American Woman”, returns this summer with a brilliant new novel, “My Education” (Viking; On-sale: July 8, 2013).  Choi will appear twice in Brooklyn to read from her novel, first at powerHouse Arena in DUMBO (July 17), and then at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene (July 30). From an author acclaimed for her psychological acuity and pitch-perfect writing, Choi’s latest is a sizzling story about desire and possession.

Regina Gottlieb has been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur even before she arrives in the fall of 1992 as a graduate student at his prestigious eastern university high on a pastoral hill. An imperious man of scandalous noteworthiness and exceptional, even sinister attractiveness, Brodeur, who is almost twice her age, is exactly the wrong man to be a teaching assistant for, let alone possibly sleep with. But it’s Brodeur’s charismatic and angry wife, the thirty-three year old Martha Hallet, who will really shake things up.

“My Education” is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away.  By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

While this novel represents a departure for Choi in terms of subject matter, it has the same forceful immediacy, narrative momentum, and, as Vogue put it, “almost surgically precise prose” that has distinguished her earlier work. Exploring love, pleasure, and devotion in all their guises, this novel will appeal to readers of Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot” and Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty.”

The July 17 event will begin at 7 p.m. powerHouse Arena is located at 37 Main St. in DUMBO.

The July 30 event will begin at 7:30 p.m. Greenlight is located at 686 Fulton St. in Fort Greene.

Susan Choi’s first novel “The Foreign Student” won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, “American Woman,” was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and her third, “A Person of Interest”, a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. A recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, in 2010 she received the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. She teaches at Princeton and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and sons.

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