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A conversation with award-winning author Rabih Alameddine for his new novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother). In conversation with Lauren Francis Sharma.
Join the Library and Politics and Prose Bookstore for a conversation with DC-base author Rabih Alameddine. In conversation with Lauren Francis Sharma, Alameddine will discuss his new novel The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother).
Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing after the discussion.
In a tiny Beirut apartment, sixty-three-year-old Raja and his mother live side by side. A beloved high school philosophy teacher and “the neighborhood homosexual,” Raja relishes books, meditative walks, order, and solitude. Zalfa, his octogenarian mother, views her son’s desire for privacy as a personal affront. She demands to know every detail of Raja’s work life and love life, boundaries be damned.
When Raja receives an invite to an all-expenses-paid writing residency in America, the timing couldn’t be better. It arrives on the heels of a series of personal and national disasters that have left Raja longing for peace and quiet away from his mother and the heartache of Lebanon. But what at first seems a stroke of good fortune soon leads Raja to recount and relive the very disasters and past betrayals he wishes to forget.
Told in Raja’s irresistible and wickedly funny voice, the novel dances across six decades to tell the unforgettable story of a singular life and its absurdities—a tale of mistakes, self-discovery, trauma, and maybe even forgiveness. Above All, The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother) is a wildly unique and sparkling celebration of love.
Rabih Alameddine is the author of the novels The Wrong End of the Telescope; Angel of History; An Unnecessary Woman; The Hakawati; I, the Divine; Koolaids; the story collection, The Perv; and one work of nonfiction, Comforting Myths. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He received the Dos Passos Prize in 2019 and a Lannan Award in 2021.
Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants, has written about the Caribbean in both of her critically-acclaimed novels, “’Til the Well Runs Dry” and “Book of the Little Axe.” Lauren holds a degree in English Literature with a minor in African-American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, and an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lauren, a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and a MacDowell Fellow, is also the Assistant Director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College.
AGE GROUP: | Seniors | Adults |
EVENT TYPE: | Author Talk |
