Event

Rabih Alameddine in conversation with Bich Minh Nguyen, The Angel of History

Sponsored by Peninsula Arts & Letters and Kepler's

Wednesday, November 16, 2016
7:30 p.m.

Kepler's Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025

A writer loved and admired by both readers and other writers is a wonderful thing. Join us for an evening with Rabih Alameddine, a novelist loved by Amy Tan, Yiyun Li, Michael Chabon and more. And a writer loved by readers for his books: An Unnecessary Woman; I, the Divine; Koolaids; The Hakawati; and the story collection, The Perv.

Rabih Alameddine is a writer of conscience, of self-consciousness, of subconsciousness, of the great big global unconscious. Amy Tan, author of The Valley of Amazement and The Joy Luck Club

Even rarer, is a novelist with a sense of humor as dry, funny, and sarcastic as Rabih's. You'll love to hear him speak about his new novel. It tells the story of Jacob, a Yemeni-born poet, as he revisits the events of his life, from his maternal upbringing in an Egyptian whorehouse to his adolescence under the aegis of his wealthy father and his life as a gay Arab man in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS plague.

Hovered over by the presence of alluring, sassy Satan who taunts Jacob to remember his painful past and dour, frigid Death who urges him to forget and give up on life, Jacob is also attended to by fourteen saints. Set over the course of one night in the waiting room of a psych clinic, The Angel of History is a hilarious and heartbreaking struggle to remember and forget the events of an astonishing life.

Bich Minh Nguyen, who also goes by Beth, is the author of the memoir Stealing Buddhas Dinner, which received the PEN/Jerard Award, the novel Short Girls, which received an American Book Award, and the novel Pioneer Girl. She teaches in and directs the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.