Readings at Parkside:  
Chloe Aridjis

The Parkside Lounge
317 East Houston Street
New York City
Tuesday, November 24th, 7:30pm

Sliding scale tickets are available HERE!

Please join us to celebrate The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis, published bySemiotext(e) / Native Agents.

This event will feature a reading ~ followed by a conversation with Chloe Aridjis, Lynne Tillman, & Ann Stephenson.

A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis, and mortality.

Before publishing her first novel Book of Clouds in 2009, Chloe Aridjis studied and wrote on poetry, magic shows, and the literature of the fantastic in nineteenth-century France. Her new novel, The Shadow of the Object, traverses a strange landscape between Mexico and London; contemporary desire and earlier technologies of illusion.

Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in the hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The  two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.

 When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewelery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.

Chloe Aridjis is the author of Book of Clouds, which won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger in France, Asunder, and Sea Monsters, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, as well as the collection Dialogue with a Somnambulist; Stories, Essays, and a Portrait Gallery.  She writes for various art journals and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.

The Shadow of the Object was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026. 

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship; a Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant; and The Katherine Anne Porter Prize awarded by The American Academy of Arts and Letters for contributions to literature. She is a professor and writer in residence in the Department of English at the University at Albany.