The Story of H by Marina Perezagua in Washington, D.C.

  • Literature
  • Washington, D.C.
  • Wed, March 20, 2019
  • 6:30 pm
The Story of H by Marina Perezagua in Washington, D.C.

Spanish writer Marina Perezagua presents her new book, “The Story of H,” a quixotic twenty-first century quest around the world to discover what makes us human.

The Story of H

The Story of H describes a searing quest by a Japanese woman and an American soldier to find a girl who goes missing in the aftermath of Hiroshima, a journey that spans the globe and travels to the darkest corners of the human mind and memory.

August 6, 1945: the day Enola Gay unleashed an atomic inferno over Hiroshima. In the wake of its devastation, two stories unfold. There’s Jim, an American soldier who was entrusted with taking care of Yoro, a Japanese girl who then disappears after the atomic bomb falls. And there’s H, a Japanese child who is at school when the bomb drops and is indelibly marked by its destruction. Both victims of the bomb, H and Jim meet for the first time in New York years later—their paths cross by chance, they fall in love, and together they continue Jim’s search for Yoro. A quixotic twenty-first century quest to discover what makes us human, from refugee camps to the slave mines of Africa, from Brazil to Borneo, Japan to Mexico, it’s also a journey that plumbs the depths and heights of cruelty and compassion, vulnerability and violence.

Marina Perezagua’s urgent and incantatory novel moves us beyond our understanding of history as broad and sweeping to the individual stories of those who feel joy and pain, who suffer and transcend.

About Marina Perezagua

Marina Perezagua is a Spanish novelist and short story writer known for her visual and mind-bending narratives. She has published two short story collections and a novel in Spain, and her stories have been published in outlets including Electric Literature and Granta UK. Perezagua received the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award at the Guadalajara International Book Fair. A graduate in art history, she is currently completing her PhD at New York University, where she also teaches at the NYU Master’s Program in Creative Writing in Spanish. She practices freediving and has swum across the Gibraltar Strait in less than four hours.

Venue

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Kramerbooks, 1517 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036

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Free

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Kramerbooks

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Presented by Kramerbooks in partnership with SPAIN arts & culture

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