🚨 The bookshop will be closed on November 11th. Orders placed on November 8th after 17h00 (French time) will be processed from November 12th 🚨 (1/3)

Website orders and inquiries are processed from Monday to Friday (2/3)

📚 Books listed on the website are not necessarily in stock and may need to be ordered 📚 (3/3)

14 November 2024 , 19:00

Yasmin Zaher on The Coin

Join us for an evening with Yasmin Zaher as she discusses her “filthy, elegant” (Raven Leilani) novel The Coin

Free & open to all. Places limited. Arrive early to avoid disappointment.

Most events take place on our first floor, which is accessible by stairs. If you have any concerns about access, please don't hesitate to contact us.

*

A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind.The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags.But America is stifling her - her wilfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness and the narrator unravels spectacularly.

Yasmin Zaher is a Palestinian writer and journalist. She got her B.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering at Yale University and an MFA in Creative Writing at The New School, where she was advised by Katie Kitamura. She lives in Paris.

Credit Willy Somma 1
“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”
JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES