A Conversation with Susan Choi Absolutely Filled With Spoilers!

Bookable features established authors and emerging talent in conversation with host and author Amanda Stern, perhaps best known for creating the Happy Ending Music & Reading Series at New York’s famous Joe’s Pub and Symphony Space. With an immersive sound experience designed around each episode, Bookable takes you on an audio exploration of a book—usually new, sometimes classic and occasionally obscure but always worth knowing about.

Spoilers and secrets have a lot in common, but what happens when a book’s structure is the spoiler? How do you talk about something like that without giving too much away? Don’t look at us for the answer. In this episode we spoil the hell of National Book Award winner Susan Choi’s novel Trust Exercise. An amazing narrative accomplishment, Choi’s book asks probing questions about the exact nature of truth, honesty and secrets. But it also asks questions about structure and form and finally one of the biggest questions for a writer these days: Exactly what makes a book a novel?

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Susan Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, won the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. Her second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a film. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award. In 2010 she was named the inaugural recipient of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award. Her fourth novel, My Education, received a 2014 Lammy Award. Her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, and her first book for children, Camp Tiger, came out earlier this year. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches fiction writing at Yale and lives in Brooklyn.