• Featuring Susan Choi, National Book Award winner and JHU Writing Seminars professor, and Gabriella Fee, current Moser Writer-in-Residence
Odyssey is thrilled to invite you to a virtual conversation on Wednesday, November 11th at 12pm EST with National Book Award winner and JHU Writing Seminars professor Susan Choi. Discussion will focus on her latest novel, Flashlight, a spellbinding account of family, loss, memory, and the unseen forces that shape our lives. "EXPLOSIVE" (The New York Times Book Review) and "ASTONISHING" (The Atlantic), Flashlight was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of President Obama's favorite books of 2025. It was a Best Book of the Year with The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications.
Our event will consist of readings from the novel, a conversation about the craft of fiction, and time for audience questions, giving you the opportunity to engage directly with Professor Choi about her writing process and the ideas at the heart of her novels. She will be in conversation with Writing Seminars lecturer and Moser Family Writer-in-Residence Gabriella Fee.
Copies of Flashlight are available for purchase through The Ivy Bookshop.
Odyssey is Johns Hopkins’ noncredit lifelong learning program organized by the Office of Alumni Relations, offering engaging courses for curious learners on topics ranging from creative writing and literature to history, science, arts, and more. Interested in exploring more including upcoming creative writing courses? Visit odyssey.jhu.edu to browse upcoming courses.
FLASHLIGHT
One night, Louisa and her father take a walk on the beach. He’s carrying a flashlight. He cannot swim. Later Louisa is found washed up by the tide, barely alive. Her father is gone. She is ten years old.
In chapters that shift from one member to the next, turning back again and again to that night by the sea, Susan Choi’s Flashlight chases the shockwaves of one family’s catastrophe. Louisa is an only child of parents who have severed themselves from the past. Her father, Serk, an ethnic Korean born and raised in Japan, lost touch with his family when they bought into the promises of postwar Pyongyang and relocated to the DPRK. Her American mother, Anne, is estranged from her family after a reckless adventure in her youth. And then there is Tobias, Anne’s illegitimate son, whose reappearance in their lives will have astonishing consequences.
What really happened to Louisa’s father? Why did he take Louisa and her mother to Japan just before he disappeared? And how can we love, or make sense of our lives, when there’s so much we can’t see?
