Lydia Kiesling's “Mobility”

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LARB Editor-in-Chief Michelle Chihara and Executive Director Irene Yoon speak with author Lydia Kiesling about her novel Mobility, this fall’s LARB Book Club selection. The inaugural book from Crooked Media Reads, Mobility begins in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, following the main character, Bunny, from childhood into her ultimate career transition to Big Oil. The novel is timely and urgent, a macro and micro study of climate change’s destructive impact on the Earth and our individual lives, and evokes the tension between emotional investment in and arms-length detachment from large-scale catastrophe. Lydia shares how she researched the book, the joys and dangers of storytelling, and how to navigate overwhelm in the face of unrelenting and difficult news cycles.