ThoughtGallery.org > Transcendent Kingdom: Yaa Gyasi with Doreen St. Félix

Transcendent Kingdom: Yaa Gyasi with Doreen St. Félix

Four years after publishing her bestselling debut novel, Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi returns with Transcendent Kingdom, a heartbreaking, hope-filled meditation on love and grief, faith and science, addiction and abandonment, immigration and isolation. Gifty is pursuing a doctorate at Stanford, looking for the biological and neurological drivers of addiction and depression. Her brother died years earlier of a heroin overdose after becoming dependent on OxyContin, and her mother lays silently in Gifty’s bed, refusing food. While trying to unlock the scientific basis for the suffering that has shaped her family and her own identity, Gifty is haunted, by the spectres of her dead brother, depressed mother, and absent father, by the isolation she experienced as a Ghanian immigrant in Alabama, and by the contradictions of the evangelical church in which she was raised and where her worldview was shaped.

Yaa Gyasi discusses Transcendent Kingdom with The New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Félix.











When: Tue., Nov. 24, 2020 at 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Where: New York Public Library—Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
476 Fifth Ave.
917-275-6975
Price: Free
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Four years after publishing her bestselling debut novel, Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi returns with Transcendent Kingdom, a heartbreaking, hope-filled meditation on love and grief, faith and science, addiction and abandonment, immigration and isolation. Gifty is pursuing a doctorate at Stanford, looking for the biological and neurological drivers of addiction and depression. Her brother died years earlier of a heroin overdose after becoming dependent on OxyContin, and her mother lays silently in Gifty’s bed, refusing food. While trying to unlock the scientific basis for the suffering that has shaped her family and her own identity, Gifty is haunted, by the spectres of her dead brother, depressed mother, and absent father, by the isolation she experienced as a Ghanian immigrant in Alabama, and by the contradictions of the evangelical church in which she was raised and where her worldview was shaped.

Yaa Gyasi discusses Transcendent Kingdom with The New Yorker staff writer Doreen St. Félix.

Buy tickets/get more info now