Reading with… Eunice Hong
Eunice Hong is the director of the Leadership Initiative and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. She was previously a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, and a law clerk to Richard M. Berman in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Hong received her J.D. from Columbia Law School after graduating from Phillips Academy Andover and Brown University. She resides in New York City. Her debut novel, Memento Mori (Red Hen Press, August 13, 2024), is the winner of the 2021 Red Hen Press Fiction Award.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Memento Mori offers a modern perspective on the Eurydice and Orpheus myth through a Korean woman who uses storytelling to try to understand her grief.
On your nightstand now:
My friends and parents make fun of me for this, but I’m always reading The Iliad. I have Allen Rogers Benner’s Selections from Homer’s Iliad next to my bed, because I’m trying to get back into a practice of reading the Greek. I also have two other books that I’m looking forward to starting:
This Flesh Is Mine by Brian Woolland, a play drawn from The Iliad that was performed in both Palestine and in London in 2014 in a joint coproduction by the Ashtar Theatre and Border Crossings; and Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon, a novel about the Peloponnesian War that debuted this year.