Columbus: Margot Singer for "Underground Fugue" with Kaylie Jones

Event date: 
05/31/2017 - 7:00pm

Please join us Wednesday, May 31st at 7pm, for a reading and conversation for Margot Singer's Underground Fugue with Kaylie Jones

Set against the backdrop of the London tube bombings in 2005, Underground Fugue interweaves the stories of four characters who are dislocated by shock waves of personal loss, political violence, and, ultimately, betrayal.

It’s April and Esther has left New York for London, partly to escape her buckling marriage, and partly to care for her dying mother; Lonia, Esther’s mother, is haunted by memories of fleeing Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II; Javad, their next-door neighbor and an Iranian neuroscientist, struggles to connect with his college-aged son; and Amir, Javad’s son, is seeking both identity and escape in his illicit exploration of the city’s forbidden spaces.

As Esther settles into life in London, a friendship develops among them. But when terrorists attack the London transit system in July, someone goes missing, and the chaos that follows both fractures the possibilities for the future, and reveals the deep fault lines of the past.

With nuanced clarity and breathtaking grandeur, Margot Singer’s Underground Fugue is an elegant, suspenseful, and deeply powerful debut.


Margot Singer won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award for her story collection, The Pale of Settlement. Her work has been featured on NPR and in The Kenyon ReviewThe Gettysburg ReviewAgni, and Conjunctions, among other publications. She is a professor of English at Denison University in Granville, Ohio.

Kaylie Jones’s latest novel, The Anger Meridian, was published in July 2015.

She is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (2009). Her novels include A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries, which was released as a Merchant Ivory Film in 1998; Celeste Ascending (2001); and Speak Now (2004). She has written numerous book reviews and articles for The Los Angeles Times, The New York TimesThe Paris ReviewThe Washington PostSalon, WOW, Huffington Post, The Guardian UK, Confrontation Magazine, and others. She is the editor of the anthology Long Island Noir (2012).

Kaylie has been teaching for more than 30 years, including at Southampton College’s MFA Program in Writing, and in the low residency MFA Program in Professional Writing at Wilkes University. She co-chairs the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, which awards $10,000 yearly to an unpublished first novel. Her latest endeavor is her imprint with Akashic Books, Kaylie Jones Books, a writer’s collective in which the authors play a fundamental part in their own publishing process.

Event address: 
450 Columbus Ave
New York, NY 10024
Underground Fugue By Margot Singer Cover Image
$25.99
Not Available
ISBN: 9781612196282
Published: Melville House - April 18th, 2017

Lies My Mother Never Told Me: A Memoir By Kaylie Jones Cover Image
$16.99
ISBN: 9780061778711
Availability: Not In Stock - Usually ships in 3-5 Days
Published: Harper Perennial - August 17th, 2010