Thursday, December 10th – 6:30 pm
In Conversation with Nina Revoyr
Author of six novels including Southland
Join us for this special honor to meet with Nina Revoyr, notable author. While the dialogue will begin with a focus on Southland, J-Sei’s Book Club recent pick, the conversation will expand to touch on Japanese American community, race relations, neighborhood, and family dynamics through an expanse of time. It’s really a rare opportunity for us to speak with Nina directly. And it turns out that we are ahead of the curve, as Nina and SOUTHLAND are receiving renewed attention in the current context of racial justice and allyship. The online literary journal Alta has just announced SOUTHLAND as one of its California Book Club selections in early 2021.
Though Southland has some of the characteristics of a detective novel, Revoyr said: “I didn’t really conceive of it as a mystery, although I’m delighted that people are embracing that aspect of it…. But this situation … was the mechanism through which [the female character] was going to go back and discover all of these things about her and her family’s past. What I was very intrigued by was … what were the dynamics of the Crenshaw district, and interracial relations, and economics in Los Angeles that could have caused the riots to have happened in the first place…. The real revelation … has to do with some of the relationships between the people in the past; that was always where I was trying to get to.” [Excerpt from Book Sense “Nina Revoyr’s Southland Stakes Out A Different Los Angeles”}
Southland explores the fragile understandings and sometimes painful misunderstandings that occur across the lines of race and culture. It is also the story of an ever-changing city. Moving in and out of the past, from the shipping yards and internment camps of World War II; to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s; to the means streets of Watts in the 1960s; to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s, Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.
NINA REVOYR is the author of six novels, including A Student of History; Lost Canyon; The Age of Dreaming, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Southland, a Los Angeles Times best seller and “Best Book” of 2003; The Necessary Hunger; and Wingshooters, which won an Indie Booksellers Choice Award and was selected by O, The Oprah Magazine as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.” Revoyr lives and works in Los Angeles.
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