Raven Leilani: How Much Are You Willing to Struggle?
From the Bookable Podcast with Author Amanda Stern
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.
What do you want to do with your life and how much are you willing to struggle for it? Bestselling debut novelist Raven Leilani has written a luminous book that explores this question. Luster is a fearless, and sometimes funny, story about a complicated, maybe even a bit perverse, black millennial, who finds some of what she thinks she wants out of life with a digital archivist named Eric, a white man twice her age in an open marriage. And then from his wife. And then from their daughter.
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Raven Leilani‘s work has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Narrative, Yale Review, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. She won Narrative‘s Ninth Annual Poetry Contest and the Matt Clark Editor’s Choice Prize, as well as short fiction prizes from Bat City Review and Blue Earth Review. Luster is her first novel.
