In Conversation: On Luster

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Honoree, 2020 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35

In Luster, we meet Edie, a 23-year-old Black woman working in New York publishing who’s barely making rent each month, trying to make sense of her life, and finding herself tangled in a suburban white couple’s open marriage. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual mores and racial politics weren’t hard enough, she’s abruptly left jobless and then invited to live in her lover’s home, though not by him – by his wife. Called “sharp, strange, propellant – and a whole lot of fun,” by Kirkus, Luster is Raven Leilani’s debut. She’s speaking with Susan Choi, a 2019 National Book Award winner in fiction for Trust Exercise.

Susan Choi

Susan Choi is the author of the novels My Education, American Woman, A Person of Interest, and The Foreign Student. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. Her novel Trust Exercise (Holt Paperbacks) follows two freshmen at a highly competitive performing arts high school. When David and Sarah, fall in love, their passion does not go unnoticed, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does. A shocking spiral of events catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What seems to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—but not false, either. The final piece of the puzzle to falls into place until the book’s stunning coda. The New York Times noted that “This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind.”

Raven Leilani

Raven Leilani’s work has been published in Granta, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications. Leilani received her MFA from NYU and was an Axinn Foundation Writer-in-Residence.

In Conversation: On Luster