With Julie Orringer, May 30, 7 PM

I'm loving Julie Orringer's new novel, The Flight Portfolio, and I'm really excited to be in conversation with her next week at Politics and Prose: May 30th, 7 PM. If you're in D.C., it would be great to see you!

Here is part of what the NYT had to say about this amazing and complicated work:

"Set in Vichy France, the novel seeks a kind of redress: restoring, to history’s vast panorama, a granular sense of how life on the borderlines of fascism feels. We’re treated to a glimpse of André Breton at a party, fashioning an impromptu brooch from a dead bumblebee, though the novel’s emphasis is not on charming details but the banality of a certain kind of evil made up of bureaucrats, bribery and lines of desperate people waiting for a lifeboat in the form of a visa that will never come, faced with exclusionary American immigration policies not so different than those in place today. As a semi-closeted gay man, Fry finds a nihilistic kind of freedom during his time in Marseille, but his task — based on the notion that some lives are worth more than others — resists heroic gloss. Orringer’s true subject, the moral peril of being alive, is a grandly timeless — and timely — one."