Event

NOVELIST MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER
Reading from his new novel Before All the World
Hosted by Huda Fahkreddine
Co-sponsored by the Kutchin Seminar Series in the Jewish Studies Program, the Middle East Center and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations

Join us on Thursday, October 27, at 6:00 PM  for a reading and conversation with MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER. Penn professor of Arabic literature Huda Fahreddine will host a program with Jerusalem-born novelist and poet Rothman-Zecher on his second novel Before All the World, a mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old. 

MORIEL ROTHMAN-ZECHER is a Jerusalem-born novelist and poet. His first novel, Sadness Is a White Bird, was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the National Jewish Book Award, the winner of the Ohioana Book Award, and longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Moriel's poetry and essays have been published in Barrelhouse, Colorado Review, The Common, The New York Times, The Paris Review's Daily, and ZYZZYVA, and he is the recipient of the National Book Foundation's '5 Under 35' Honor, two MacDowell Fellowships, and Yiddishkayt's Wallis Annenberg Helix Fellowship. His second novel, Before All the World, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on October 11th, 2022.
Praise for Before All the World:
"Before All the World startles and swirls, and makes fresh the experience of language itself. It has it all: a gripping story, an original structure, and a tender, ghostly glow.
— Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
"Before All the World is beautiful and original. It is also strange, arresting, high-risk. Very quickly this novel starts to work on the mind, making itself felt in complex and powerful and visionary ways, led by the rhythm in the language and the urge to make that language new."
— Colm Tóibín, author of The Magician
"Evocative, inventive, vivid, and strange, Before All the World is a mesmeric, enrapturing read."
— Eimear McBride, author of Strange Hotel