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.
Huge thanks to Publishers Weekly for this wonderful article celebrating our milestone!
Click the image to read the article!
As a promising young writer, Cheri Johnson won a series of big awards like the Bush Fellowship and the McKnight Fellowship, which gave her the funding to focus on finishing her first book. But she took a wrong turn with that book and struggled for years to write a new novel and find a publisher.
After more than a decade, she’s finally published that book: “Anika Rose,” based loosely on “Rosemary’s Baby,” but set in Lake of the Woods County where she grew up. She tells KFAI’s Rob McGinley Myers what she’s learned through that process about why she writes.
When I picture Washington, I see fog drifting through trees on mountains, muddy and mossy rainforests, flashy skyscrapers filled with tech workers, arid fields with giant windmills, winding forest roads with small general stores, cherry blossoms, shipping containers at the port … the list goes on.
That’s why I get a thrill reading books that capture Washington’s essence. And I’m not talking about the Raymond Carver stories that skirt around the vaguely-Pacific-Northwest setting in devotion to characters and interpersonal relationships (though I’m a sucker for those, too). I’m talking about literary odes to Washington.
LitHub’s podcast, The History of Literature, features Carlos Allende, author of Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love.
For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today?
Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.
This is KUOW’s book club, and we just read through the first half of Kristen Millares Young’s debut novel “Subduction.” I’m your club guide, Katie Campbell. Let’s get into it.
I’m just a reader, standing in front of Claudia, asking her to chill out.
To recap, briefly: Claudia, one of our main characters, is a Latina anthropologist who has traveled to the Makah Nation in Neah Bay to continue her work with an elderly Makah woman named Maggie. Maggie is in the throes of dementia when her son Peter, our other main character, reappears. Peter is haunted by the murder of his father. Claudia is haunted by her husband’s affair with her own sister. Neither deals with their pain in an especially healthy way, but Claudia is dealing with it by taking what isn’t hers: Maggie’s stories, memories, and songs.
In his third poetry collection from Red Hen Press, Kim Stafford gathers poems that sing with empathy, humor, witness, and story. Poems in this book have been set to music, quoted in the New York Times, posted online in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, gathered in a chapbook sold to benefit Ukrainian refugees, posted online in response to Supreme Court decisions, composed for a painter’s gallery opening, and in other ways engaged with a world at war with itself, testifying for the human project hungry for kinship, exiled from bounty, and otherwise thirsting for the oxygen of healing song.
