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Signature EventOn-Stage with
Debut Novelists
Anouk Markovits • Jennifer Miller • Francesca Segal
Moderated by Julia Pistell
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
7:30 pm
Event co-chairs: Abby Alter, Fran Landy, Lauren Tafrate
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 Provocative and deeply absorbing, I Am Forbidden by Anouk Markovits is a family saga set in the most insular and fundamentalist sect of Hasidic Jews, the Satmar. Spanning four generations, cultures, and continents, from pre–World War II Transylvania to 1960s Paris to contemporary New York, I Am Forbidden is an emotionally gripping story of what happens when unwavering love, unyielding law, and centuries of tradition collide.
Anouk Markovits grew up in France, in an ultra-orthodox Satmar home. She attended a religious seminary in England instead of high school. After she left home at the age of nineteen to avoid an arranged marriage, she attended Columbia University's School of General Studies. She has a Master of Architecture from Harvard and a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell. Her first novel, Pur Coton, was written in French (Gallimard). I Am Forbidden is her English-language debut. |
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 The Year of the Gadfly by Jennifer Miller is an exhilarating debut novel about adolescence in the rarified world of New England prep schools. After the loss of her best friend, Iris Dupont is pulled away from everything she knows and moved to the stuffy, highly competitive Mariana Academy, where a secret society has been ruthlessly exposing students and teachers for their every indiscretion.
Jennifer Miller is the author of Inheriting the Holy Land: An American’s Search for Hope in the Middle East. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MS in Journalism and an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Marie Claire, Men’s Health, the Christian Science Monitor, Salon.com, and others. She is a native of Washington, D.C., and currently lives in Brooklyn. |
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 Set in the modern-day upper-crust Jewish community of North West London, a community still under the shadow of the Holocaust and where the bonds of family and tradition run deep, The Innocents is slyly humorous and deeply satisfying. It illuminates the conflict between responsibility and passion, security and exhilaration, tradition and independence.
Francesca Segal was born in London in 1980, the daughter of novelist Erich Segal. Brought up between the UK and America, she studied at Oxford and Harvard Universities before becoming a journalist and literary critic. Her work has appeared in Granta, The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, FT Magazine, and The JC, among others. For three years she wrote the Debut Fiction Column in The Observer and was a features writer at Tatler. With experience as a book critic in the UK—and a literary pedigree to boot—Francesca Segal is a fresh and arresting new voice on the U.S. literary scene.
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Program subject to change.
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