Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive and McNally Jackson Present Country of Origin by Dalia Azim and The Longcut by Emily Hall
Join Dalia Azim and Emily Hall to celebrate the publication of their thrilling debut novels, with a conversation about the road to publication, art, and more.
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COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
In Country of Origin by Delia Azim seventeen-year-old Halah Ibrahim has always known a privileged life and never had cause to question it until Cairo goes up in flames. Not only does she start to doubt her father and his role in the new military-backed government--but she ultimately decides to flee to America with a young soldier she hardly knows, an impulsive act that has far-reaching consequences on both sides of the ocean. A powerful and universal debut novel about family, identity, and independence, Country of Origin is as much about a nation's coming-of-age as it is about secrets and lies, love and truth.
THE LONGCUT
In The Longcut, Emily Hall's narrator is an artist who doesn't know what her art is. As she gets lost on her way to a meeting in an art gallery, walking around in circles in a city she knows perfectly well, she finds herself endlessly sidetracked and distracted by the question of what her work is and how she'll know it when she sees it.
Her mental peregrinations take her through the elements that make up her life: her dull office job where she spends the day moving items into a "completed" column, insomniac nights in her so-called studio (also known as her tiny apartment), encounters with an enigmatic friend who may or may not know her better than she knows herself. But wherever she looks she finds only more questions--what is the difference between the world and the photographed world, why do objects wither in different contexts, what is Cambridge blue--that lead her further away from the one thing that really matters. An extraordinary feat of syntactical dexterity and comic ingenuity, The Longcut is ultimately a story of resistance to easy answers and the place of art and the artist in the world.