Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with writer Iman Mersal, celebrating her latest works translated into English, Motherhood and Its Ghosts and Traces of Enayat. Mersal will be in conversation with writer and editor Elizabeth Brogden.

From one of the preeminent poets of the Arabic-speaking world come two brilliant works of creative nonfiction that consider the lives of women as remembered—or overlooked—by the archive.

Iman Mersal has only one photograph of her mother, who died giving birth at age twenty-seven. But the woman portrayed in it strikes her as very unlike the one in her fleeting childhood memories, in mood, expression, dress.

When Mersal has a child of her own decades later, she begins to wonder whether it’s possible to depict a mother with any degree of fidelity. How to represent—in photography, dream, memory, or writing—an individual whose complex inner landscape has suddenly come under threat of looming archetypes? What is hidden in traditional representations of moth­erhood? What lies outside the narrative in which motherhood “means giving, the melding of two distinct selves, a love unlimited and unconditional”?

Sifting through the archives of motherhood, including journal entries, photo­graphs, and the writings that have informed her own poetic practice, Mersal privileg­es questions over answers, drifting over arriving, allowing a form of motherhood to exist in these pages unbounded.

Iman Mersal is an Egyptian writer, translator, and literary scholar. A professor of Arabic language and literature at the University of Alberta, she is the author of five books of Arabic poetry. In English translation, her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Parnassus, The Paris Review, and The Nation, among others. The Threshold, translated by Robyn Creswell and published in 2022, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the 2023 National Translation Award. Mersal received the 2021 Sheikh Zayed Book Award in Literature for her creative nonfiction book Traces of Enayat, published by Transit Books in 2024.

Robin Moger is a translator of Arabic to English who lives in Barcelona. His translations of prose and poetry have appeared in Blackbox Manifold, The White Review, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Washington Square Review, Michigan Review, and elsewhere.

Moderator Elizabeth Brogden is a Boston-based writer and editor whose essays, reviews, prose poems, and stories have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Bellevue Literary Review, Full-Stop, and The Common, among others. She holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University, with a specialization in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature.

Books! Banter! Cinema!

The ZYZZYVA 2025 Movie Night series kicks off on Monday, April 14, with Lauren Markham & Jenny Odell and the cult-hit documentary River and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time (2001). River and Tides examines the breath-taking outdoor sculptures of Goldsworthy, who only works with natural material and whose art (some of which can be found in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park and the Presidio and at Stanford) was designed to “deteriorate.” Markham calls River and Tides “a study of reverence and impermanence that invites us to approach our art—and the world we live in—with a simultaneous diligence and improvisation, artistry and exertion, attention and whimsy, curiosity and devotion.”

The film will be introduced by Markham, whose most recent book, Immemorial—a dazzling synthesis of reporting, memoir, and essay—meditates on language in the face of climate catastrophe. Following the movie, there will be a short conversation between Markham and Odell about River and Tides.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. with a book signing. Movie introduction starts promptly at 6, followed by a conversation at the end of the screening. ZYZZYVA Movie Night is copresented with Litquake, San Francisco's literary festival (October 9–25, 2025).

Lauren Markham’s work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and the critically-acclaimed A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. Her new book, Immemorial, was published in 2025.

Jenny Odell is the author of the New York Times bestsellers How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy and Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock. Her other writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Paris Review, and The Believer. Odell has been an artist in residence at the San Francisco Planning Department, the Internet Archive, and Recology SF. From 2013 to 2021, she taught art at Stanford University.