Wed 9/23 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

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Join us as we celebrate new fiction from Katherine Nouri Hughes and Joyce Carol Oates. The authors will give readings from their recent work and be joined in conversation.

In Katherine Nour Hughes’s latest novel, While We Were Waiting, Lorraine and Will, New Yorkers married for 15 years, are having their first baby, via IVF. They are 40, successful in their careers—finance and music—with pasts that have held each of them back from one another until the day While We Were Waiting unfolds: the day in the middle of Lorraine’s sixth month when she is rushed to the high-risk obstetrics unit of Met U Hospital. Over then ext hours Lorraine and Will, individually, are compelled to face themselves and their pasts in ways they’d never thought possible: Will struggling with the loss of a beloved mentor who perished with the World Trade Center; Lorraine, a musical prodigy dealing with the ongoing aftermath of betrayal and abuse.

Sharing the waiting room with Will is Clement, an Iraqi archeologist newly arrived in America, having fled with his family from ISIS. He, too, struggles with trauma – from a murderous terrorist attack, from the high-risk delivery that his wife is enduring, and from a long-ago guilt that makes him fear for his laboring wife and their unborn child. As the space shared by Will and Clement expands with every hour and revelation. Lorraine’s labor compels her to let go of the grievous harm done to her in her youth, making While We Were Waiting a story about the imaginative power of acceptance and love.

What a very confident and stirring novel this is. It passes my most difficult test: it involves me so thoroughly that I began to anticipate how it would end, given its preoccupations.  And gloriously, it surprised me and proved me—amazingly —to be underappreciating the author’s immense discretion and resourcefulness.  It’s a novel that thoroughly works and illuminates life.
― Richard Ford

A vividly realized, dazzlingly intimate novel of intertwined lives and pasts, set in the most suspenseful of places—the intensive care maternity ward of a New York hospital. Katherine Hughes has written a breathtaking, heartrending, and finally uplifting novel—a mesmerizing reading experience.
― Joyce Carol Oates, author of Fox

Kate Hughes has brilliantly set her novel in the high-risk labor and delivery ward of a New York hospital. Her characters are survivors of trauma who have chosen to give birth to new life. The suspense built in by the complications of the pregnancies is matched by the stories that unfold while we are waiting. With its vibrant characters and pitch-perfect dialogue, the novel is hard to put down. In the end, we discover that the highest risk is to love in the aftermath of loss and violation.
― Carol Gilligan, author of The Deepening Darkness

Katherine Nouri Hughes is an American writer of Iraqi-Irish descent. She was educated at Princeton (MA Near Eastern Studies), has lived in Cairo and traveled extensively in the region. She is the author of The Mapmaker’s Daughter, a novel published by Delphinium Books. She’s had careers as a communications executive in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors and served as a long-term trustee of the American University in Cairo, WNET/Thirteen and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. She lives in Princeton and New York City.

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Frenzy (noun): a temporary madness; a violent mental or emotional agitation; intense usually wild and often disorderly compulsive or agitated activity

Joyce Carol Oates is a master of the short story and one of the legends of the form. Her collections of short fiction have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and have won numerous awards, including the O. Henry Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story. In The Frenzy: Stories, Oates plunges us into the lives of her characters at moments of crisis and confusion, when much of what they understand about themselves and those they love comes undone.

A young woman on a supposedly romantic weekend trip to Cape May, New Jersey, turns the tables on her older, married lover. A freak bicycle accident on a bridge haunts one family for decades. A girl jealous of her popular cousin discovers she is the lucky one. A widow waits at her riverside house for her dead husband’s return. A young man hiking in the woods comes upon a couple in a heated, possibly violent argument—should he intervene?

Suspenseful and psychologically astute, Oates’s short stories enthrall and captivate as they dissect her character’s deepest fears—revealing our own in turn. “Literature is a texture of words,” says Oates of her short fiction, “evoking life in the most vivid ways—psychologically, physically.” These new stories blazingly evoke life at its most vivid and perilous, when fate and free will intersect, and one ominous encounter or bad choice can be the difference between an ordinary day and the point of no return.

A gripping collection of propulsive, psychologically suspenseful stories by the legendary Joyce Carol Oates “who is surely on any shortlist of America’s greatest living writers” (The New York Times Magazine)

“Haunting . . . masterfully orchestrated . . . Oates’s best work is simmering and remorseless.”—Vogue

“Astounding . . . Oates imbues this entire book with psychological suspense and high stakes.”—Harper’s Bazaar

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Barack Obama, the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix Femina, the Cino Del Duca World Prize, and is a five-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the bestsellers Blonde and We Were the Mulvaneys. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Distinguished Professor of the Humanities Emerita at Princeton University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2024 she won the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award given to “a master of the thriller and noir literary genre.”

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Program in Creative Writing and Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton's Humanities Council, and Labyrinth Books.