Beginning with a father’s disappearance on a breakwater in Japan, Susan Choi‘s sixth novel Flashlight unfolds across decades and continents, tracing how loss, exile, and political upheaval shape one family’s fate. Joined in conversation with The New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins, Choi will explore how both memory and history illuminate, distort, and leave certain truths in shadow.
About the speakers:
Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, and the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Photo Credit: Laura Bianchi, Bogliasco Foundation
Lauren Collins is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her subjects have included Michelle Obama, Emmanuel Macron, Demna, the street artist Invader, French tacos, the refugee crisis, and equal pay. Since 2015 she has been based in Paris, covering stories mainly from France. She is the author of When in French: Love in a Second Language, which the Times named as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2016. Her second book, “They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live With Its Legacy,” will be published on July 7, 2026.
