Summer Shorts: Sigrid Nunez

First Light Books is hosting a reading session around the work of Sigrid Nunez on Thursday, July 23, at 6 PM. It's part of their Summer Shorts series, and the format is pretty straightforward: everyone reads a short story by Nunez together. If you've been meaning to get into her work but haven't found the right moment, this is a low-pressure way to do it with a group.

Nunez is a writer who doesn't exactly follow the usual trajectory. She grew up in public housing in Brooklyn and Staten Island, the youngest of three girls. Her father was Chinese-Panamanian and spent his life working in Chinese restaurants; her mother was German. They met in occupied Germany after the war. She went to Barnard, earned her MFA from Columbia, and worked at the New York Review of Books, which is where she met Susan Sontag. Nunez eventually moved in with Sontag and her son, and Sontag became her mentor.

Her first novel didn't come out until she was in her forties, and she won the National Book Award for The Friend at sixty-seven. Her writing tends to circle back to grief, animals, friendship, and the general difficulty of being a person in the world—the kind of things that usually feel too big to talk about in a casual conversation. If those are themes you find yourself thinking about, you'll probably find something to hold onto here.

The session is at First Light Books, 4300 Speedway, Austin, TX 78751, starting at 6 PM on Thursday, July 23.