The Old Fire: On Writing, Memory, and Belonging

Praise for The Old Fire

“I began this book late at night, intending to read one chapter, and emerged from its powerful enchantment a few hours later, having accidentally reached the end. A bewitching meditation on tenderness and violence, intimacy and estrangement, The Old Fire will transport you to an ancient and wild place, immersing you in its temperatures and rainfalls, its grief and grace and sound and silence. You won't be the same when you leave it. A breathtaking achievement from one of my favorite living writers.”— Tess Gunty, National Book Award–winning author of The Rabbit Hutch

“A touching, mysterious novel, imbued with the beauty and strangeness of a fairy tale.”— Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists

“The Old Fire traces the silences within a family, alongside the muscle memory of childhood intimacy and our attempts to break through loneliness when words fail us. Elisa Shua Dusapin observes her characters with anthropological curiosity and great sensitivity. Her wisdom will astound you.”— Sanaë Lemoine, author of The Margot Affair

“The spaces left unfilled are what give the text its otherworldly magic.”— Grace Linden, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Dusapin is a writer gifted in atmosphere; every image in this slim novel oozes with portent and symbolic weight. . . . A delicate and elegant novel that asks what we owe the ones we love.”— Kirkus Reviews

“Quietly affecting. . . a beautiful rendering of unresolved adolescence.”— Publishers Weekly

“Intriguing and surprising.”— BookPage

“A soulful look at the ties we cannot break no matter how hard we try.”— Booklist

Praise for Winter in Sokcho

“Mysterious, beguiling, and glowing with tender intelligence, Winter in Sokcho is a master class in tension and atmospherics. . . . Dusapin has a rare and ferocious gift for pinning the quick, slippery, liveness of feeling to the page: her talent is a thrill to behold.”— Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Dusapin’s terse sentences are at times staggeringly beautiful, their immediacy sharply and precisely rendered from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. . . . Winter in Sokcho is a noirish cold sweat of a book.”— The Guardian

About the Author

Elisa Shua Dusapin was born in France and raised in Paris, Seoul, and Switzerland. Her debut novel, Winter in Sokcho, was awarded the Prix Robert Walser, the Prix Régine Desforges, and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature, and her books have been translated into thirty-five languages. She lives between Amman and Switzerland. Her fourth novel, The Old Fire, originally published in French as Le vieil incendie, received the Prix Wepler and Prix Fénéon and was a finalist for the Prix Médicis.

About the Moderator

 

Shuchi Saraswat is a writer and editor based in Boston. Her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Orion, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ecotone, and elsewhere, and have earned special mentions in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. In 2024, her novel-in-progress received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Foundation and was shortlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize.

A passionate advocate for international and cross-cultural storytelling, she spent a decade as a bookseller in Massachusetts, during which she founded the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith. She's now the senior editor of the international literary magazine, AGNI.