Hala Alyan Discusses Salt Houses with Lauren Wein
By Ian MacAllen
Thursday, May 11th, 2017 | 4,432 views
Hala Alyan discusses her debut novel, Salt Houses, feeling like an outsider, and convincing herself nobody would read her novel.
Hala Alyan discusses her debut novel, Salt Houses, feeling like an outsider, and convincing herself nobody would read her novel.
The Center for Fiction hosted authors Adam Wilson and Peter Mountford for a reading from their new books and a discussion between them. Wilson’s collection of stories What’s Important is Feeling will be released next week while Mountford’s novel The Dismal Science was released in January.
The Center for Fiction brought Gabriel Roth and Kristopher Jansma together for a discussion of coming of age stories. Both Jansma’s The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards and Roth’s The Unknowns feature protagonists in their twenties coming to terms with adulthood. Roth qualifies this point by saying of his protagonist that “he completely fails to come of age,” and in a way, his novel is about the failure to mature.
The Center for Fiction hosted a panel discussion focusing on process and craft inspired by Dani Shapiro’s new memoir, Still Writing. Along with Shapiro, the panel included Darin Strauss, author of the memoir Half a Life (September 2010) and novel More Than it Hurts (June 2008) and Adam Wilson, author of Flatscreen (February 2012) and a forthcoming collection of stories.