Lisa Halliday

Harvard Book Store and GrubStreet welcome Whiting Award–winning writer LISA HALLIDAY for a discussion of her debut novel, Asymmetry.

About Asymmetry

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. The first section, “Folly,” tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. A tender and exquisite account of an unexpected romance that takes place in New York during the early years of the Iraq War, “Folly” also suggests an aspiring novelist’s coming-of-age. By contrast, “Madness” is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda.

A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is an urgent, important, and truly original work that will captivate any reader while also posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.

Praise

“Asymmetry is extraordinary, and the timing of its publication seems almost like a feat of civics . . . Halliday’s prose is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like a commentary on the state of fiction . . . It’s a first novel that reads like the work of an author who has published many books over many years . . . Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction.” —Alice Gregory, The New York Times Book Review

"Lisa Halliday’s debut novel, Asymmetry, begins with a lopsided affair—a perfect vehicle for a story of inexperience and advantage . . . Alice and Amar may be naive, but Halliday is knowing—about isolation, dissatisfaction and the pain of being human." —Time Magazine

"Asymmetry is a novel of deceptive lightness and a sort of melancholy joy.  Lisa Halliday writes with tender laugh-aloud wit, but under her formidable, reckoning gaze a world of compelling characters emerges.  She steps onto the literary stage with the energy of a debut novelist and the confidence of a mature writer." —Louise Erdrich, author of LaRose and Future Home of the Living God