KENT—The House of Books will present a discussion of the final issue of John Freeman’s influential literary magazine—this volume called Freeman’s: Conclusions—Wednesday, Dec. 6, at 6 p.m.
Program participants include Kerri Arsenault, Hannah Lillith Assadi and Emily Raboteau, who will read from their works and then engage in a panel discussion with editor Freeman.
Freeman was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include Dictionary of the Undoing, How to Read a Novelist, Tales of Two Americas, and Tales of Two Planets. His poetry includes the collections Maps, The Park, and Wind, Trees. In 2021, he edited the anthologies There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love with Tracy K. Smith, and The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story.
An executive editor at Knopf, he also hosts the California Book Club, a monthly online discussion of a new classic in Golden State literature for Alta magazine. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and the Paris Review and has been translated into 22 languages.
Arsenault is a literary critic, co-director of The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown University; associate at the Mahindra Center at Harvard; contributing editor at Orion magazine; and author of Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains. Her writing has been published in the Boston Globe, The Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, Freeman’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.
Assadi teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts. Her first novel, Sonora, received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. In 2018, she was named a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her second novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, came out in 2022 to great acclaim. She lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.
Finally, Raboteau is the author of The Professor’s Daughter, Searching for Zion—winner of the American Book Award—and Lessons for Survival, to be published next spring. She’s a contributing editor at Orion magazine and a professor of creative writing at the City College of New York. She lives in the Bronx.
