Episode 369 - Joan Leegant - Displaced Persons, Israel and the power of stories

Joan Leegant's story collection, DISPLACED PERSONS: STORIES, winner of the New American Fiction Prize, will be out in June 2024.

Her earlier books won the PEN/New England Book Award, the Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and finalist citation for the National Jewish Book Award and selection as a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick.

From 2007 to 2013, Joan was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University outside Tel Aviv where she also gave talks on American literature and culture under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy and was a volunteer ESL teacher for African refugees and asylum seekers, experiences that made their way into her fiction. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts.

Book: DISPLACED PERSONS: STORIES

Coming June 2024 from New American Press

Winner of the New American Fiction Prize

Set half in Israel and half in the States, the stories in this prize-winning collection explore the experience of exile, belonging, and what it means to call a place home. A visiting professor from Boston forms an unlikely bond with an Israeli born in Iraq. Two teenage tourists are startled out of their naiveté in a restaurant in Jerusalem’s Old City. A gifted yeshiva student spiraling into mental illness takes refuge in the poetry of Walt Whitman. An aged widower returns after sixty years to the Bronx neighborhood of his youth to make amends with a first love he abandoned to go to prison. Shimmering with insight and compassion, DISPLACED PERSONS is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope.

https://www.joanleegant.com/

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