A Year in Reading

My aim this year was to read 100 books, while my 2023 total of print, audio, and ebooks comes to 42, my goal may have been too ambitious—but there’s always 2024. Here’s this year’s breakdown: 19 novels, 7 memoirs, 4 short story collections, 4 poetry collections, 3 essay collections, 3 novellas, and 2 chapbooks. Some highlights:

Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of Istanbul is a deep dive into a place over time—the city where Pamuk was born, and still lives, and knows intimately. The memoir looks at the city’s history, geography, and collective psychology in chapters on Istanbul’s artists, poets, and writers (along with terrific photos), alongside the intersection of person and place that has driven Pamuk’s fiction and nonfiction. It’s also a memoir of becoming a writer, one raised in privilege, and yet there doesn’t seem a corner of the city in which Parmk doesn’t see something of himself. • If you’re looking for a sharp, fresh read—don’t miss Open Throat, by Henry Hoke—a novella that will leave you seeing the LA hills, and mountain lions, in a new way; and Sidik Fonfana’s terrific collection, Stories from the Tenants Downstairs. •  Another story collection not to be missed, Andrew Porter’s The Disappeared, which looks at youth with thoughtful nostalgia, and in settings that are meticulously realized. Keith Pilapil Leismester’s novella, Mississippi River Museum mines place with elegiac tone and beautifully calibrated detail. For the sheer beauty and power of language and image, there’s none better than Hala Alyan’s poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year and Zaina Hashem Beck’s O. • My lighter reads this year included Alan Bennett’s classic novella, The Uncommon Reader, a fantasy of Queen Elizabeth and a bookmobile, and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, a fairy tale of LA seventies rock and roll. • Among the outstanding audiobooks I listened to this year was Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, read incandescently by Meryl Streep, and Elizabeth McCracken narrates her novel/memoir, The Hero of This Book—I can’t imagine the book without her wonderfully wry tone. Ditto for Harry Windsor’s Spare, whose narration was both elevated in tone (given his British elocution), yet beautifully down to earth. • In books on writing craft, Edith DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing was a revelation—not everyone it seems writes a book in a year; and Colm Toibin’s essay collection, A Guest at the Feast, makes one feel precisely that way. I grew up in Los Angeles—east of the 101—and loved Matthew Specktor’s essays on LA, Always Crashing in the Same Car, on his youth there, and the writers, filmmakers, and highly particular mix of weather, geography, and culture. • John MaGahern’s memoir, All Will Be Well, like the Irish writer’s fiction, is filled with moving detail of character and place; as was Genanne Walsh’s chapbook memoir, Eggs in Purgatory, which looks at caring for an ill parent in prose that illuminates the empathy and complexity of the father-daughter bond; and Stanley Tucci’s memoir, Taste, on a life of food and cooking is not only entertaining and instructional, but ultimately arrives at a much deeper place. I’d love to know what your standout reads were for 2023!

My December newsletter is live

My last newsletter of 2023 is live with thoughts on deep dives and the unexpected connections that come with revision., along with news on writing that’s hitting the airwaves in 2024, and the year in cultural consumption. You can read here, and don’t forget to subscribe—it’s free!

Pictured: (clockwise from left) My paternal grandmother, Fausya Zemberekci, photographed at home in Beyoğlu (then Pera), Istanbul, about 1919; (right) The Grand Rue de Pera (now Istiklal Street), Beyoğlu, 26 July 1912; film still from “Past Lives,” dir. Celine Song (2023).

Forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review!

A story from my novel-in-progress recently found a home at the terrific Alaska Quarterly Review, and I couldn’t be happier. “Eraser” is told from the point of view of six-year-old Gillian, and features an earthquake, shoplifting, lies of omission, and father-daughter prevarication against the backdrop of southern California’s San Gabriel Valley. Michael Dirda, of The New York Review of Books, calls AQR “one of our best, and most imaginative, literary magazines.” Watch this space for the publication date!

My June newsletter is live

Alongside my latest news on publications, the great essay collections I’ve been reading, and my dip into short-form video essays on TikTok, my latest newsletter looks at F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dilemma over titling The Great Gatsby, and the eventual, now-classic choice he was always unhappy with. Read—and subscribe!—here.

Revisiting "Are You Really Sisters" for Arab American Heritage Month

It’s always interesting to look at your work through a different lens, and experimenting with the short-form video app TikTok has led to recreating some of my previous writing as short videos. I love working with words and images, and using TikTok’s format, I created digest versions of the written works. These include my 2020 essay for Catapult, “Are You Really Sisters,” which looks at mixed heritage and physical differences within families. While the written version allows for depth and detail, translating the material into video creates a quick, vivid dip into the subject. It’s been great too to reach viewers/readers on TikTok I might not have otherwise. You can watch the video here—comments are on and I’d love to hear what you think. And if you’re on TikTok, let’s connect—I’m at @laurenalwan989

Join us at AWP in Seattle

A persistent thought in my head—where does my work even fit in?—sparked this panel coming to AWP, and I'm grateful to these brilliant writers, Karen Tei Yamashita, Thais Miller, Sandy Marchetti, and Toni Jensen for the chance to chat about literary influences, echoes, and writing in and outside of tradition.

If you’re headed to the conference, join us! Friday 3/10, 1:45 F208 Terrace Suite II, Level 4, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center https://www.awpwriter.org/awp_conference/schedule_overview