ELISA ALBERT
Wednesday, March 19 at 7:30 p.m.

A twenty-nine-year-old, chronically underachieving, unemployed Jewish woman is diagnosed with terminal brain cancer in Elisa Albert's darkly comic first novel, The Book of Dahlia (Free Press). "Hilarious and heartbreaking ... Albert's superb first novel ... begins with the omniscient narrator's scathingly Edith Wharton-worthy catalogue of Dahlia's symptoms and ends with her first grand mal seizure ... Throughout, Albert delivers Dahlia's laissez-faire attitude toward other people and lack of ambition with such exactness as to strip them of cliché and make them grimly vivid." - Publishers Weekly. "Elisa Albert has the unique gift of making bedmates out of humor and heartbreak. The Book of Dahlia is wonderful." - Gary Shteyngart. Elisa Albert also teaches creative writing at Columbia, and is an editor of the online magazine Jewcy (www.jewcy.com).

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