The Queens Public Library is continuing its ‘Literary Thursdays’ program for 2025 with a host of talented authors ready to give virtual talks about their work.
Every Thursday at 6 p.m., hour-long online book talks, which are free and open to the public, will take place to enrich audiences about their favorite authors and pieces of literature.
QPL has released the lineup for the opening month of the new year, which kicked off with author Rahad Abir on Thursday, Jan. 2.
Abir’s novel ‘Bengal Hound’ is a story of love and loss, tracing the turbulent years in East Pakistan before a mass revolution and the creation of Bangladesh. He “explores the dynamics of nationalism, family, religion, and gender relations, revealing how the fracturing and making of a country leaves indelible marks on its people.”
‘Bengal Hound’ won the Georgia Author of the Year Award for literary fiction, and Abir has an MFA in fiction from Boston University. He has received the Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia and the Marguerite McGlinn Prize for Fiction.
Award-winning Nigerian-American journalist Rita Omokha is next up on Jan. 9. Her book, ‘Resist: How a Century of Young Black Activists Shaped America,’ chronicles race-related activism over the last century and draws on her own experiences as a Black immigrant in the United States.
Omokha is an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She graduated at the top of the 2020 class and received some of the institution’s highest awards, including the Pulitzer Prize Traveling Fellowship. You can register for her talk here.
Following this, Tyriek White will host a talk on Jan. 16 about his novel ‘We Are a Haunting.’ It won the 2023 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. It is described as a “supernatural saga and searing social critique that follows three generations of a working-class family and their inherited ghosts.”
White is a writer, musician, and educator from Brooklyn and was named a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree in 2024. His talk can be registered for here.
On Jan. 23, Evan Rail will discuss his book, ‘The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit.’ It examines a drink that was banned globally for a century but is now legal and widespread.
Rail set out to discover the truth about a mysterious dealer who claimed to possess a collection of 100-year-old bottles of absinthe. Along the way, he drinks with absintheurs frantically chasing down pre-ban bottles.
He also visited modern distillers who have seen their status rise from criminal bootleggers to sought-after celebrities and relates absinthe’s history from its birth in Switzerland through its coming of age in France and its modern revival. You can register to hear about Rail’s journey here.
Finally, on Jan. 30, Souvankham Thammavongsa will talk about her book, ‘How to Pronounce Knife.’ This collection of stories honors characters who struggle to make a living and find their bearings far from home, even as they do the necessary “grunt work of the world.”
The short story collection was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN Open Book Award and won the 2020 Giller Prize.
Thammavongsa was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. Her stories have won an O. Henry award and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Granta, and NOON. Register for her discussion here.
QPL has locations in Ridgewood, Glendale, Woodhaven, and many more across the borough.
