Join me on June 20th to discuss LOST EMPRESS by Sergio De La Pava.

On Wednesday, June 20th from 6 pm – 8 pm, I’ll be hosting PEN America’s book club at The Edison in downtown Los Angeles.

The evening will feature The Edison’s signature cocktails and an animated discussion of Sergio De La Pava’s third novel, Lost Empress.

Lost Empress is De La Pava’s first commercially published novel (he self published his first two). It’s a comedic tour de force featuring a sprawling cast of characters and a plot that encompasses a sibling tussle over an NFL franchise, an accidental death that results in vengeance and malpractice claims, and even a scheme to steal a Dali painting engineered by a shadowy crime syndicate and involving the novels two main characters, Nuno and Nina, whose certainty in their own quests for justice lends them a superhuman quality. It’s De La Pava’s storytelling style, though, that most captivates me. Says the The New Yorker:

[De La Pava’s] style…is the extraordinary thing, as it would need to be to unite all the elements of a novel of this length and sprawl. It is colloquial in tempo yet nerdy in content, divinely detached yet intimately casual in tone, impossibly learned and improvisational at the same time. If de la Pava has a signature move, it’s to zoom out from a highly specific action or bit of characterization in order to generalize about or extrapolate from it, while still holding on to the speech-replicating sentence structures that ground that action in a kind of conversational specificity…

Our discussion of this extraordinary novel is sure to be lively and invigorating. Please join me on the 20th. Click here to RSVP.

 

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