In There’s Going to Be Trouble, a young teacher seeking new beginnings arrives in Paris as the Gilet Jaune protests are gaining momentum. Drawn into a love affair and the political turmoil simultaneously, she struggles to distinguish between the overlapping passions of her new life. Accompanying this story is the discovery of a hidden family history of protest nearly fifty years prior, in the late 1960s. As secrets of political alignment and engagement come to light, our narrator discovers that the past and its consequences are nearer than she knew.
Jen Silverman presents a portrait that echoes across history, and a searching investigation into the responsibilities we hold to past, the present, and future generations.
About the speaker:
Jen Silverman (they/them) is a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Their books include the debut novel We Play Ourselves (named one of the best books of the year by Buzzfeed; a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), interlinked story collection The Island Dwellers (finalist for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), and novel There’s Going to be Trouble, newly out from Random House. Their plays include Spain, Witch, Collective Rage: A Play In 5 Betties, and The Roommate, and have been produced off-Broadway, across the US, and internationally in countries including Australia, The Czech Republic, Brazil, and the UK. Silverman wrote The Miranda Obsession as a narrative podcast for Audible, starring Rachel Brosnahan; it debuted at #3 in Fiction on Audible’s weekly best-seller list and won four Signal Awards. Silverman has written on Tales of the City (Netflix) and is a writer-producer on Tokyo Vice Season 2 (Max). Silverman is a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, a Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim.
The Library’s Scholar of Note program is supported by The de Groot Foundation.
