Zachary Lazar - THE APARTMENT ON CALLE URUGUAY - book pre-launch celebration

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay by Zachary LazarYou are invited to join us at Cafe Istanbul with author Zachary Lazar for a presentation celebrating his about to be released novel, THE APARTMENT ON CALLE URUGUAY, along with authors Jami Attenberg and Maurice Carlos Ruffin. Octavia Books will have books available for purchase at the event.
A haunting new novel by the author of VENGEANCE in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico.

Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that "words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time.” He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, “a rural nowhere…that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.”

In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to “reinvent herself as the kind of person she’d been before” the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell’s former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika’s incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana’s exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of "home" vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.

The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.

"Zachary Lazar is a master of moments lesser writers gloss over. His characters are intensely human, intriguing, and inviting. Readers will relish the feeling that they are observing secret lives." —Maurice Carlos Ruffin, author of We Cast a Shadow

"The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is an exquisite example of a master craftsman working in his prime. I greatly admire the rigor of Zachary Lazar's prose, and the elegance and ease of his storytelling." —Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours and The Middlesteins


author Zachary LazarZachary Lazar is the author of five previous books, including the novel Sway, the memoir Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder, and the novel I Pity the Poor Immigrant, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the 2015 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for "a writer in mid-career whose work has  demonstrated consistent excellence." Lazar lives in New Orleans, where he is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University.

 

 
 

Event date: 

Monday, April 18, 2022 - 7:00pm

Event address: 

Cafe Istanbul - 2372 St Claude Ave - New Orleans, LA 70117
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay: A Novel By Zachary Lazar Cover Image
$26.00
Email or call for price
ISBN: 9781646221110
Published: Catapult - April 26th, 2022

Pre-order now. If you wish to pick up your book(s) at the Cafe Istanbul event, select the " Store Pickup" option and write  "signed copy - attending" under Order Comments.

You may also request a signed copy for store pickup or to be shipped if you are unable to attend.


"A politically deft and emotionally devastating exploration of what it means to live in exile. With great lyricism and sly wit, Lazar illuminates the many varieties of longing for home." —Jenny Offill, author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation


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