Watch: Literary Lights: Featuring Nancy Agabian

The penultimate event from our 2023 reading series, Literary Lights, featured Nancy Agabian, author of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction finalist The Fear of Large and Small Nations. Agabian was joined by fellow writer Aida Zilelian, author of The Legacy of Lost Things (2015) and the forthcoming All the Ways We Lied (2024). The event, co-sponsored by the Armenian Bar Association, took place virtually on November 5, 2023. Watch here.

In this epic feminist-misadventure story, a bisexual woman returns to her twice-estranged homeland determined to find belonging. Alongside a mosaic of artists, intellectuals, and students facing restrictive gender politics, she sifts through her own traumatic history of genocide and survival, bears witness to post-Soviet echoes, all the while navigating the vulnerable borders that exist between nations and individuals. This riveting, multilayered novel will make you laugh, cry, rage, and in the end, hold it tenderly against your heart.” — Catherine Kapphahn, Immigrant Daughter: Stories You Never Told Me

You can now purchase The Fear of Large and Small Nations from the NAASR bookstore, in addition to Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble and Amazon. Agabian is donating October profits from book sales to All for Armenia , and November profits to Women’s Support Center. Learn more about the book here.

Literary Lights is a monthly reading series organized by IALA, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR), and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. The series—held from February to December 2023 in a mixed online and in-person format—features new works of literature by Armenian authors.