About the Event: Across genres, styles, and forms, feminism is alive and well in contemporary literature. Aggeliki Pelekidis’s Unlucky Mel (Cornell University Press, 2024) is a humorous and moving feminist campus novel and Aida Zilelian’s All the Ways We Lied (Keylight Books, 2024) is a heartfelt family saga focused on four sisters. Please join us for a lively reading and conversation about their stories and publishing journeys. Moderated by Jennifer Savran Kelly, author of Endpapers.

About the Books:

All the Ways We Lied – Set in Queens, New York, meet the Manoukians—a dysfunctional Armenian family and the fraying rope that binds them. While a father deteriorates from terminal illness, three sisters contend with one another, their self-destructive pasts, and their indomitable mother as they face the loss of the one person holding their unstable family together. Kohar, the oldest sister, is happily married, yet grapples with fertility issues and, in turn, her own self-worth. Lucine, the middle child, is trapped in a loveless marriage and haunted by memories of her estranged father. Azad, the beloved youngest child, is burdened by an inescapable cycle of failed relationships. By turns heartfelt and heart wrenching, All the Ways We Lied introduces a cast of tragically flawed but lovable characters on the brink of unraveling. With humor and compassion, this spellbinding tale explores the fraught and contradictory landscape of sisterhood, introducing four unforgettable women who have nothing in common, and are bound by blood and history.

Unlucky Mel: A Novel –  PhD candidate Melody Hollings is in the final year of her creative writing program in upstate New York. Her dream life of landing the perfect academic job somewhere far away from her small hometown and publishing her first novel is so close to becoming a reality. But first she has to finish writing that book. Oh, and graduate. To do both, she needs her good friend Ben to reciprocate all the help she’s given him over the years on his writing. But when Mel’s widowed father starts acting strangely, she is thrown. After chalking it up to a dramatic attempt to manipulate her into moving back in with him, she discovers that he really is suffering from dementia. Now she’ll need to stay local to care for him. Her dream is dying and her best option is to win a postgraduation fellowship through her alma mater. Despite all the upheaval in Mel’s life, rather than helping her, Ben turns on her in a shocking betrayal. For the first time, Mel has a nemesis! The stress of caring for her father, teaching too many students, and living with so much uncertainty over her future escalates Mel’s desire for retribution–until one night, she discovers an opportunity to ruin Ben’s reputation. Unlucky Mel is a smart, funny debut in which Pelekidis explores the lengths we’re willing to go to in order to even the score and the ways in which women are often expected to sacrifice their professional ambitions for the men in their lives.