Tues 3/31 @ 6:00PM
Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau Street

Join us for a conversation between Professor Max Weiss and Hannah Lillith Assadi on her novel Paradiso 17, an intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over.  This conversation is presented by the Princeton Palestinian Studies Colloquium.

Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward—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 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, the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife.

Hannah Lillith Assadi 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. Her second novel The Stars Are Not Yet Bells was named a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Her third novel Paradiso 17, inspired by the life of her late Palestinian father, is forthcoming from Knopf in March 2026. She is also the co-editor of an anthology of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, which will be published by Everyman’s Library/ Knopf in November 2026. She teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. In 2018, she was named a '5 under 35' honoree by the National Book Foundation.

Max Weiss is Associated Faculty in Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Baʿthist Syria and In the Shadow of Sectarianism: Law, Shiʿism, and the Making of Modern Lebanon; co-editor (with Jens Hanssen) of Arabic Thought Beyond the Liberal Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Nahda and Arabic Thought Against the Authoritarian Age: Towards an Intellectual History of the Present; and translator, most recently, of Alawiya Sobh, This Thing Called Love; Dunya Mikhail, The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq; and Nihad Sirees, States of Passion. He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle East History from Stanford University, held postdoctoral fellowships at Princeton University and the Harvard Society of Fellows, and his research has been supported by the Fulbright-Hays Commission, the Social Science Research Council, and the Carnegie Corporation.

This event is co-sponsored by Princeton University’s Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, Humanities Council, Palestinian Studies Colloquium, University Center for Human Values, and Labyrinth Books.