Paradiso 17 with author Hannah Lillith Assadi
2026-03-25 19:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, 98122, United States
Hannah Lillith Assadi
Wednesday March 25th, 2026 @ 7:00PM – 8:00 PM

Novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi visits the store for her latest book Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, which follows one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope.
Registration is not required, but helps us anticipate audience size. If you’d like to RSVP, please do so here!
“There is something miraculous about Paradiso 17, about the poetry that seems to guide every sentence of this exquisite novel. With stunning intimacy, Hannah Lillith Assadi has crafted an unforgettable story about the many stunted afterlives of hyphenated belonging. In this book live some of the most complex characters I’ve read in a long time, and a deeply nuanced exploration of exile as both event and inheritance.” —Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
“Paradiso 17 is remarkable. It’s a novel of unearthing, a story of quiet explosions, of memories lost and recovered. It’s urgent and necessary. Read it as an intimate family tale, as mythos, or as history—but read it, read it, read it.” —Rabih Alameddine, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope
All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe.
Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.
Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile / shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.
Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.
Hannah Lillith Assadi, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. She is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, was a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Raised in Arizona, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. (Photo credit: Jordan Ledy)

Paradiso 17 with Hannah Lillith Assadi
2026-03-26 19:00 - 20:30 | Third Place Books – Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, Seattle, WA, 98115, United States
“There is something miraculous about Paradiso 17, about the poetry that seems to guide every sentence of this exquisite novel.” —Omar El Akkad
Third Place Books welcomes Hannah Lillith Assadi to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her novel, Paradiso 17. Following a Palestinian man forced to leave his home as a child during the 1948 Nakba, this visionary book explores calamity, connection, human complexity, and the lifelong aftermath of exile.
“Paradiso 17 is a masterclass in diasporic storytelling—gorgeously written and devastatingly necessary.” —Rafe Posey, Third Place Books Ravenna
This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
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Amal El-Mohtar in Conversation With Kelly Sue DeConnick - TICKETED EVENT
2026-03-29 19:00 - 21:00 | Powell’s Books, 1005 W Burnside St., Portland, OR, 97209, United States
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Iron (Tordotcom) is an enchanting short story collection by Amal El-Mohtar — the bestselling, award-winning co-author of This Is How You Lose the Time War.

With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose.

Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Iron includes “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” “The Green Book,” “Madeleine,” “The Lonely Sea in the Sky,” “And Their Lips Rang with the Sun,” “The Truth About Owls,” “A Hollow Play,” “Anabasis,” “To Follow the Waves,” “John Hollowback and the Witch,” “Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers,” “Pockets,” and more.

El-Mohtar will be joined in conversation by comics writer Kelly Sue DeConnick.

Seasons of Glass and Iron by Amal El-Mohtar
2026-03-30 17:30 - 18:30 | Central Library [Spokane], 906 W Main, Spokane, WA, 99201
Full of glimpses into gleaming worlds and fairy tales with teeth, Seasons of Glass and Iron (Tordotcom) is an enchanting short story collection by Amal El-Mohtar — the bestselling, award-winning co-author of This Is How You Lose the Time War.

With confidence and style, El-Mohtar guides us through exquisitely told and sharply observed tales about life as it is, was, and could be. Like miscellany from other worlds, these stories are told in letters, diary entries, reference materials, folktales, and lyrical prose.

Full of Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and Hugo Award-winning and nominated stories, Seasons of Glass and Iron includes “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” “The Green Book,” “Madeleine,” “The Lonely Sea in the Sky,” “And Their Lips Rang with the Sun,” “The Truth About Owls,” “A Hollow Play,” “Anabasis,” “To Follow the Waves,” “John Hollowback and the Witch,” “Florilegia, or, Some Lies About Flowers,” “Pockets,” and more.

Hannah Moushabeck presents 'Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine'
2026-06-02 18:00 - 21:00 | Third Place Books – Lake Forest Park, 17171 Bothell Way NE #A101, Lake Forest Park, WA, 98155, United States
A love letter to home, to family, and to persistent hope that transcends borders.
Third Place Books welcomes author Hannah Moushabeck to our Lake Forest Park store for a conversation about her picture book Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine: a moving, beautifully illustrated story of a family keeping their home alive in memory.
This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

Randa Tawil: 'Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire'
2026-07-22 19:00 - 20:30 | Third Place Books – Ravenna, 6504 20th Ave NE, Seattle, WA, 98115, United States
The hope, struggle, and complexity of life on the move
Third Place Books welcomes University of Washington lecturer Randa Tawil to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new book, Race in Transit: Tracing the Politics of Migration from Ottoman Syria through US Empire. Making migrants the agents of a world history that has too often relegated them to the sidelines, Race in Transit explores the social construction of race in the early twentieth century and its impacts on Syrian migrants to the United States. Maryam S. Griffin, author of Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank, joins in conversation.

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!
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Randa Tawil is a Palestinian-Lebanese researcher, writer, and lecturer at University of Washington in the Jackson School of International Studies. She holds a doctorate in American Studies from Yale University, and writes about migration, US empire, and the Middle East. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Margins, and Open Democracy, as well as scholarly journals.
Maryam S. Griffin is an associate professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at University of Washington, Bothell. Broadly, her work examines people’s ordinary movements, both physical and political, and how they confront state power in quotidian and spectacular ways. She is the author of Vehicles of Decolonization: Public Transit in the Palestinian West Bank, part of the Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality book series with Temple University Press, and the co-editor of We Will Not Be Silenced: The Academic Repression of Israel’s Critics.
