Gather at the Cup & Chaucer in Hillman Library to hear Univeristy of Pittsburgh faculty read selections and moderate discussions focused around their recently published work of literature.

In story after story of this highly anticipated collection, Geeta Kothari lays bare an America deeply uneasy about its heterogeneity. In “Small Bang Only,” a man from the former Yugoslavia struggles to come to terms with his wife’s successful career in America only to find the resolution to his grief in violence. In “Missing Men,” a woman from an unnamed African country wrestles with her sense of self when she is forced to hide her identity after her boss, the editor of a community newspaper, is arrested in a post 9/11-related investigation. And in “Her Mother’s Ashes,” a young Indian woman taking her dead mother’s cremated remains “home” to spread in the Ganges comes to realize that the very idea of home may have vanished forever. In stories bristling with the tensions of an increasing globalized world, Kothari’s luminous prose pulls back the curtain on one of the most pressing problems of contemporary life: how can we understand ourselves in an ever-shifting world.