A stunning historical novel that sets a coming-of-age narrative and cross-cultural romance amidst a vibrant political moment in postwar Paris.

Paris, 1947. Still recovering from the Nazi occupation that left its economy in shambles and unraveled its social fabric, the city brims with international students, American GIs, and young people from France’s colonies. Cecile Rosenbaum, from a bourgeois Jewish family that lost everything, meets Minette Traoré, a feisty, French-born girl of Senegalese descent, on the bus to a Communist Youth Conference. There, she also meets Sebastien Danxomè, an aspiring architecture student from West Africa, and romance blooms. Back in Paris, as these young internationals haunt the cafés and jazz clubs of the Latin Quarter, Cecile and Sebastien find their budding love muddied by confused loyalties and unyielding cultural traditions. Nuanced, powerful, and sharply realized, The New Internationals chronicles the postwar awakening and the young women and men who rose up—and came together—in an attempt to imagine a better world.

David Wright Faladé worked on The New Internationals during his 2021-2022 term as the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He will discuss his book with award-winning author Julie Orringer.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

David Wright Faladé is a professor of English at the University of Illinois. He is the author of the novel Black Cloud Rising, and coauthor of the young adult novel Away Running and the narrative history Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers, which was a New Yorker notable selection and a St. Louis-Dispatch Best Book of 2001. The recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, he has written for the New Yorker, Village Voice, Southern Review, Newsday, and more.

Julie Orringer is the author of three award-winning books: How to Breathe Underwater, The Invisible Bridge, and The Flight Portfolio, which was the basis for the 2023 Netflix series Transatlantic. She is the winner of the Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, MacDowell, and the Cullman Center, where she was the Rona Jaffe Foundation Fellow. She teaches at New York University and Stanford University, and lives in Brooklyn, where she is at work on a new novel.

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ACCESSIBILITY

In-Person | Assistive listening devices and/or hearing loops are available at the venue. You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation or CART (Communication Access Real-Time Translation) captioning service by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template. This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

Livestream | Captions and a transcript will be provided. Media used over the course of the conversation will be accompanied by alt text and/or audio description. You can request a free ASL (American Sign Language) interpretation by emailing your request at least two weeks in advance of the event: email accessibility@nypl.org or use this Gmail template.

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The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.