{"id":130995,"date":"2023-08-07T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-08-07T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=130995"},"modified":"2023-08-01T17:48:58","modified_gmt":"2023-08-01T22:48:58","slug":"local-literary-event-mona-simpson-in-conversation-with-melissa-ginsburg-for-commitment-friday-august-18th-530-pm-at-off-square-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/local-literary-event-mona-simpson-in-conversation-with-melissa-ginsburg-for-commitment-friday-august-18th-530-pm-at-off-square-books\/","title":{"rendered":"Local Literary Event: Mona Simpson in conversation with Melissa Ginsburg for “Commitment” Friday, August 18th, 5:30 PM at Off Square Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR\u2014a masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother\u2019s collapse and the fate of her family after she enters a California<\/strong> state hospital in the 1970s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Please join Square Books<\/strong> as we welcome Mona Simpson<\/strong> in conversation with Melissa Ginsburg<\/strong> for Mona’s new novel Commitment<\/em><\/a>. <\/em>Friday, August 18th at 5:30 pm at Off Square Books<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Book<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When Diane Aziz drives her oldest son, Walter, from Los Angeles to college at UC Berkeley, it will be her last parental act before falling into a deep depression. A single mother who maintains a wishful belief that her children can attain all the things she hasn\u2019t, she\u2019s worked hard to secure their future in caste-driven 1980s Los Angeles, gaining them illegal entry to an affluent public school. When she enters a state hospital, her closest friend tries to keep the children safe and their mother\u2019s dreams for them alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At Berkeley, Walter discovers a passion for architecture just as he realizes his life as a student may need to end for lack of funds. Back home in LA, his sister, Lina, who works in an ice-cream parlor while her wealthy classmates are preparing for Ivy league schools, wages a high stakes gamble to go there with them. And Donny, the little brother everybody loves, begins to hide in plain sight, coding, gaming, and drifting towards a life on the beach, where he falls into an escalating relationship with drugs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moving from Berkeley and Los Angeles to New York and back again, this is a story about one family trying to navigate the crisis of their lives, a crisis many know first-hand in their own families or in those of their neighbors. A resonant novel about family and duty and the attendant struggles that come when a parent falls ill, Commitment<\/em><\/a> honors the spirit of fragile, imperfect mothers and the under-chronicled significance of friends, in determining the lives of our children left on their own. With Commitment<\/em><\/a>, Mona Simpson, one of the foremost chroniclers of the American family in our time, has written her most important and unforgettable novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Author<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

MONA SIMPSON<\/strong> is the author of Anywhere But Here<\/em>, The Lost Father<\/em>, A Regular Guy<\/em>, Off Keck Road<\/em>, My Hollywood<\/em>, and Casebook<\/em>. She has received a Whiting Writer\u2019s<\/strong> award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton<\/strong>, an NEA<\/strong> fellowship, a Guggenheim <\/strong>grant, a Lila Wallace Prize<\/strong>, a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters<\/strong>, and the Mary McCarthy Prize<\/strong>. Off Keck Road<\/em> was a finalist for the PEN\/Faulkner Award<\/strong> and won the Heartland Prize<\/strong> from the Chicago Tribune<\/em>. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters<\/strong> and is the publisher of The Paris Review<\/em>, where she worked as an editor in her twenties. She lives in Santa Monica, California<\/strong>. She\u2019s on the faculty at UCLA<\/strong>, where she often teaches Middlemarch<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

About the Host<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Melissa Ginsburg<\/strong> is the author of the poetry collection Dear Weather Ghost <\/em>and most recently, Doll Apollo, <\/em>which won the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters<\/strong> award in poetry, and the novels The House Uptown<\/em> and Sunset City<\/em>. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker<\/em>, West Branch<\/em>, Fence<\/em>, the Southwest Review<\/em>, and other magazines. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Mississippi<\/strong> and serves as associate editor of the Tupelo Quarterly<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Commitment<\/em><\/strong>
By Mona Simpson
$30.00
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 9780593319277<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR\u2014a masterful and engrossing novel about a single mother\u2019s collapse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":238,"featured_media":130996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2239],"tags":[4765,4910,8323,5,26200,13759,4,26201,602,2888,655],"class_list":["post-130995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-literary-events","tag-california","tag-commitment","tag-melissa-ginsburg","tag-mississippi","tag-mona-simpson","tag-off-square-books-2","tag-oxford","tag-santa-monica","tag-square-books","tag-ucla","tag-university-of-mississippi"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/08\/mona-simpson-commitment.jpg?fit=2000%2C1000&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}