Authors on Tap: Shze-Hui Tjoa and Lindsay Hunter

Please join us in person on Wednesday, May 22nd at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Shze-Hui Tjoa's debut memoir, The Story Game. Shze-Hui will be in conversation with Exile MVP Lindsay Hunter!

About The Story Game:
In the humid dark of a eucalyptus-scented room, a woman named Hui lies on a mattress telling stories about herself to her listener, a little girl. She talks about her identity as the child of an immigrant, her feelings about being in a mixed-race marriage, her opinions on mental health. But as her stories progress, it becomes clear a volatile secret lurks beneath their surface. There are events in Hui's past that have great significance for the person she's become, but that have gone missing from her memory. What is it, exactly, that is haunting Hui? Who is the little girl she talks to? And who is Hui herself?

As the conversation continues, what unfolds is a breathtaking, unexpected journey through layers of story toward truth and recovered identity; a memoir that reenacts, in tautly novelistic fashion, the process of healing that author Shze-Hui Tjoa moved through to recover memories lost to complex PTSD and, eventually, reconstruct her sense of self. Stunning in its originality and intimacy, The Story Game is a piercing tribute to selfhood and sisterhood, a genre-shattering testament to the power of imagination, and a one-of-a-kind work of art.

About the authors:
Shze-Hui Tjoa is a writer from Singapore who lives in the UK. Her debut memoir is The Story Game (Tin House). She is a nonfiction editor at Sundog Lit, and previously served as fiction editor of Exposition Review. Her work has been published in journals including Colorado Review, Southeast Review, and So to Speak, and has been listed as notable in three successive issues of The Best American Essays series (2021-23). Her work has received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation, Disquiet International, and AWP’s Writer to Writer Mentorship Program.

About Lindsay Hunter:
Lindsay Hunter received her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She co-founded and co-hosted the groundbreaking Quickies! reading series, an event that focused on flash fiction. Her first book, Daddy’s, a collection of flash fiction, was published in 2010 by featherproof books, a boutique press in Chicago. Her second collection, DON’T KISS ME, was published by FSG Originals in 2013 and was named one of Amazon’s 10 Best Books of the Year: Short Stories. Her first novel, Ugly Girls, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2014. The Huffington Post called it “a story that hits a note that’s been missing from the chorus of existing feminist literature.” Her latest novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, was a Book of the Month Club selection, a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Review of BooksFiction Award, and a 2017 NPR Great Read. She produces and hosts the podcast I’m a Writer But, a series about writers with kids, jobs, and/or lives, and how they make it all work (or don’t). Lindsay’s fifth book, a novel titled Hot Springs Drive, is out now on Roxane Gay Books and was named one of the 12 Best Thrillers of the Year by the Washington Post. She lives in Chicago with her family.

About this event:
This is a free, in person event and registration is required. Please click on the link below to register for free. Shze-Hui and Linsday will be happy to sign/personalize copies of their books after the event! Can't make it to the event? Signed copies will be available in store and online after the event.

REGISTER FOR FREE