3:00 - 5:00
Sorayya Khan reads from her new book, We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir, and will be in conversation with SFPL Adult Services Librarian Francisco Cardona, M.A. Comparative Literature, San Francisco State University.
Even when we leave them, our cities never leave us. After her Dutch mother’s death, Sorayya Khan confronts her grief by revisiting their relationship, her parents’ lives, and her own Pakistani-Dutch heritage in a multicultural memoir that unfolds over seven cities and three continents. We Take Our Cities with Us ushers us from Khan’s childhood independence forged at her grandparents’ home in Lahore; to her adolescence in Pakistan’s new capital, Islamabad; to Syracuse and Ithaca, New York, where Khan finds her footing as the mother of young, brown sons in post-9/11 America; to her birthplace, Vienna, where her parents die; and finally to Amsterdam and Maastricht, the cities of her mother’s conflicted youth. In Khan’s gripping telling of her immigrant experience, she shows us what it is to raise children and lose parents in worlds other than your own. Drawing on family history, geopolitics, and art in this stunning story of loss, identity, and rediscovery, Khan beautifully illuminates the complexities of our evolving global world and its most important constant: love.
Sorayya Khan is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir (The Ohio State University Press 2022), and three novels, Noor (Penguin India 2004), Five Queen’s Road (Penguin India 2009), and City of Spies (Little A 2017) which received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair, 2015. She’s the winner of a Malahat Review Novella Prize and the recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Award that took her to Pakistan and Bangladesh to research a novel. Her work (including excerpts from her memoir) has appeared in several publications including Guernica, Longreads, The Kenyon Review, North American Review, and more.