Dear USC Rossier Faculty, Staff and Students,
I’m happy to announce the next book we will read and discuss in our USC Rossier Book Club: The Other Americans, by Laila Lalami. Our school-wide discussion will take place in the USC Hotel’s Central Ballroom on Wednesday, October 30, from 12:00–2:00 p.m. Lunch will be provided, so please RSVP by Friday, October 11.
Books will be available for pick up, with my compliments, in WPH 1102 beginning Monday, September 23, from 10:00-12:00 p.m. and 2:00-4:00 p.m., until Friday, October 11. At this time, we do not have audio copies available. ***Please note that your acceptance of the book indicates your commitment to read it and participate in our discussion! ***
We also welcome participants to join the discussion remotely. Please provide a mailing address if you will need the book shipped to you. A link to our virtual classroom will be provided closer to the date of our gathering.
Part of the Rossier Way
We launched the Book Club as part of our initiative, “The Rossier Way,” which is designed to cultivate a culture of caring and support amongst faculty, staff and students. I am hosting the Book Club events in partnership with Darline Robles, Associate Dean of Equity and Inclusion.
Our goal is to select a work of fiction that helps us explore themes relevant to our mission to advance educational equity. You can find a brief synopsis of The Other Americans here. Reviews of the book include:
Washington Post: Lalami “plunges into lives of fictional yet convincingly real individuals, who, despite their differences in origin and socioeconomic station, all have a whiff of the unwanted hovering about them, and a desperate wish for dignity lodged within them…. Lalami gives us a searching exploration of the lives of several individuals with whom mainstream American society has a vexed relationship.”
The Atlantic: “To the extent that the The Other Americans is a mystery or procedural, the novel does offer an answer to its central case, a nudge toward some small amount of justice. Even so, the book’s conclusion about American identity is a far more tenuous one than this legal resolution: For people on the country’s margins, particularly immigrants, not gesture of patriotism will ever be enough.”
Laila Lalami is the winner of the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize and is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits; Secret Son; and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. A professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles.
We look forward to a lively discussion in October.
