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Author Talk: Lisa Ko

Lisa Ko in conversation with Kat Chow for her new novel Memory Piece.

Join the Library and Loyalty Bookstores for a special conversation with award-winning author Lisa Ko and her exciting new novel Memory Piece. 

Copies will be available for sale and signing, and a limited number will be available for free courtesy of the DC Public Library Foundation. 

About the Book

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity.

By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves. 

Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

About the Author

Lisa Ko is the author of the nationally bestselling novel The Leavers, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Ko’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and her essays and nonfiction have been published in The New York Times and The Believer.

About the Conversation Partner

Kat Chow is a reporter and writer, and the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), named a New York Times Notable Book. She was a reporter at NPR, where she was a founding member of the Code Switch team and podcast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, New York Magazine’s The Cut and on Radiolab, among others. She's an occasional fourth chair on Pop Culture Happy Hour and has guest hosted Slate’s podcast The Waves. She’s received residency fellowships from Storyknife and the Millay Colony, as well as an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She has led classes and spoken about her reporting in Amsterdam, Calgary, Boston, Seattle and many other places.

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