Latest news with #SusanChoi
Elle
4 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Elle
Susan Choi Recommends a Book So Engrossing It Made Her (Almost) Lose Her Luggage
Welcome to Shelf Life, What began as a short story in The New Yorker is now Susan Choi's sixth and latest novel, The Indiana-born, Texas-raised, New York-based bestselling author studied literature at Yale University; was once The New Yorker and co-edited Likes: theater; Dislikes: Good at: rocking her Bad at: cleaning menorahs; coming up with Scroll through the reads she recommends below. The book that…: …made me miss a train stop: It's not exactly a missed-the-train moment, but I was re-reading …made me weep uncontrollably: Philip Roth's …I recommend over and over again: Jenny Erpenbeck's …I swear I'll finish one day: All of Proust. Or even just some decent amount of Proust. I love the prose but also find it so exquisite it's almost unbearable to continue reading for any length of time, at least for me, which makes me feel like a total failure as a reader. I might have to set aside a year of my life just to read Proust. ...I read in one sitting; it was that good: Sarah Moss's …currently sits on my nightstand: …made me laugh out loud: Paul Beatty's …has a sex scene that will make you blush: In Francisco Goldman's ...I've re-read the most: ...makes me feel seen: looking at me, like it knew exactly who I was. The protagonist has, like me, a real culture-clash background, and up to the point in my life when I read the book—the '90s—I'd never encountered that in fiction, so it was very emotional when I finally did. ...everyone should read: ...I could only have discovered at ...fills me with hope: Everything by elating observer of us humans and the strange things we do. Bonus questions: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be: The literary organization/charity I support: Read Susan Choi's Book Recommendations Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov Now 24% Off Credit: Vintage Everyman by Philip Roth Now 12% Off Credit: Vintage Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck Now 66% Off Credit: New Directions Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss Now 50% Off Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Real Americans by Rachel Khong Now 32% Off Credit: Vintage The Sellout by Paul Beatty Credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux The Ordinary Seamen by Francisco Goldman Credit: Grove Press The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Now 30% Off Credit: Charles Scribner's Sons A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez Now 36% Off Credit: Picador Paper Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie Credit: Riverhead Books
Vogue
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
Susan Choi on the Sprawling Stories Behind Her New Novel, Flashlight
Susan Choi is known for writing novels that mine enormous richness from highly specific settings, whether a high school-level theater program in 2019's Trust Exercise, a sexually charged campus environment in 2013's My Education, or a life on the run from the FBI in 2003's American Woman. But her latest book, Flashlight—out now from Macmillan Publishers—is perhaps her most ambitious effort yet. In Flashlight, a Korean national named Serk (formerly Seok) leaves the Japan of his youth to build a new life in the United States. What follows is a chronicle of four generations' worth of his family life—the precision and emotional resonance of Choi's sentences proving endlessly dazzling. This week, Vogue spoke to Choi about how winning the National Book Award in 2019 affected (or didn't affect, as the case may be) the process of writing Flashlight, digging into historical research about Korean-Japanese relations, and her preoccupation with abduction stories. The conversation has been edited and condensed. Vogue: What did the craft process of writing this book look like for you? Susan Choi: Oh, gosh, the process was so…I don't want to say chaotic, because I think that that gives an impression of a lot of energy and movement and this was much more slow, meandering, confused, you know, like a blindfolded person trying to navigate a very complicated obstacle course. I mean, I really struggled with this book. I feel like it evolved in a lot of disconnected bursts of writing that then required me to go back and go in circles. It was a composition process kind of like no other. Honestly, it was more like the first book I ever wrote than my sixth book. I just felt like I'd never written a book before. How did it feel to embark on a new project after winning the 2019 National Book Award in Fiction for Trust Exercise? I have to say, it wasn't really on my mind, and I'm so grateful for that. I definitely am someone who I would have thought would be really prone to finding that really stressful, but it was very hard to even connect those two facts in my mind. It feels so strange to say this, but it was partly thanks to COVID; like, COVID was such a huge rupture in our shared reality and in my individual reality, and this book really kind of grew out of COVID. I published the short story that now forms the very opening pages of the book during COVID—that was something that I had been working on during quarantine in 2020—and then started growing the rest of the book out of that. I just wasn't really thinking much about 2019, or the National Book Award, or the fact that this book, if it even ever came to exist, would follow the previous book. There was a big gap that separated those two realities, and I think it wasn't until this book was really close to being finished that I was like, Oh, this is the follow-up to that, and in the experience of any outsider to my life, this will be the next thing that comes after that other thing. I'm really glad I didn't think about that much before, because it feels very strange. I don't want to preoccupy myself about: Is this a good follow-up? Is it a weird follow-up? Is it a bad follow-up? It just is, and I can't change it now.
New York Times
02-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
A Novel Highlights a Dark Korean History and a Shattered Family's
FLASHLIGHT, by Susan Choi Friends are God's apology, it's said, for relations. In Susan Choi's ambitious new novel, 'Flashlight,' we're dropped into a shattered Korean American family, and friends are few and far between. This is a novel about exile in its multiple forms, and it reads like a history of loneliness. Nearly every person has the detachment of a survivor. A similar detachment — a narrative austerity that is one of Choi's hallmarks — is present in the book itself, for good and sometimes ill. This novel begins, as do Francoise Sagan's 'Bonjour Tristesse' and Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea,' on a beach. A father and his young daughter are out for a walk in the gloaming. He carries a flashlight. When they fail to return, search parties form. The girl is later found in the tide margin, hypothermic, barely alive, with little memory of what occurred. Her father, who can't swim, is gone — apparently drowned and carried out to sea. The girl's name is Louisa. She's 10 and precocious. Her father, an academic, is named Serk. That's what he goes by in America, at any rate. His impoverished Korean parents had named him Seok, and when he went with them as a child to Japan during World War II, so that they could find work, he was known in school as Hiroshi. He was a striver, and he loved being Hiroshi. 'Flashlight' spans decades, and four generations of Serk's family. The novel's abiding theme may be what one character wonders early on: if 'supernatural vengeance exists, for the person who tries to renounce his birthplace.' Serk's painfully split identities reflect the contested politics of the postwar era, with America and the Soviet Union (as well as Japan and China) jostling for advantage on the Korean Peninsula. Many writers are only partially conscious of the meanings in their work. Choi has set out to shine a flashlight, if you will, on a series of historical wrongs, the worst of them committed by North Korea. By the end of this novel, the author's research into these machinations, and some of their brutal human ramifications, including re-education camps, nearly swamps the book — the narrative begins to feel like reportage, like didactic historical exposé. It's hard to talk about the plot, and the resonances, of 'Flashlight' without dropping spoilers like a trail of seeds. But I will try to avoid them, out of deference to the reader but also to Choi, a major world writer who deserves the chance to reveal her cards slowly. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Washington Post
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
With ‘Flashlight,' Susan Choi gets even more ambitious
If you read it, you remember it: Five years ago, Susan Choi published a fraught story in the New Yorker about a little girl sparring with a psychologist after her father drowned in Japan. Rife with childhood aggression and confused grief, it's a brilliant piece that slams shut in a moment of terrifying darkness.
