Please join us for our next READ 718 Reads! with Susan Choi to discuss her new novel, Flashlight. READ 718 Reads! is an intimate evening (max 40 guests) in a private Brooklyn home which allows for direct conversation with the author. Dinner and drinks will be served. 

Published in June 2025, Flashlight was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award. 

Susan Choi is the author of Trust Exercise, which received the National Book Award for fiction, as well as the novels The Foreign Student, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and My Education. She is a recipient of the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction, the PEN/W. G. Sebald Award, a Lambda Literary award, the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. She teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Accolades for Flashlight include the following:

“Flashlight is instantly bewitching: a mysterious family tragedy whose solution reaches beyond psychology into geopolitics. Susan Choi’s fictional investigation reveals a writer at the height of her spectacular powers.”

—Jennifer Egan, author of The Candy House

“In a brilliant feat of storytelling, both intimate and sweeping, Susan Choi has created a profoundly moving epic that blends a tender family portrait with a haunting examination of the Korean diaspora. Flashlight is that rare novel that has everything I want in fiction: gorgeous writing, fascinating characters I fell in love with, an immersive, addictive story with an ending that made me gasp, then cry. I’m in awe.” 

—Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls

“In this superbly crafted book, the fraught geopolitics of family life—the official secrets, the acts of espionage, the diplomatic failures—are set against the intimacies, grievances, conflicting memories, and unmet needs of national allegiance. Ferociously smart and full of surprises, Flashlight is thrilling to the last.”

—Eleanor Catton, author of Birnam Wood

Get your copy (if you haven't read it already) and join us. Lots to discuss!

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*Location shared after ticket purchase (in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn)

Get your physical copy here

Get your Kindle copy here

All proceeds from this event directly support READ 718 programming. We will serve more kids than ever before in the 2025-2026 academic year. 

THANK YOU!