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Los Angeles Book Club: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

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PEN America and The Edison hope to see you at our September Book Club to discuss Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Read the Resistance author Sunil Yapa. Hosted by Melissa Chadburn.

“Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist will compel you to look and then to witness. ‘We are mad with hope’ the narrator says early on, and by the end the reader is too.”—Tiphanie Yanique, author of Land of Love and Drowning

Free and open to all, both PEN America Members and non-Members. Specialty cocktails will be offered all night, and happy hour prices are available.

Members of the Book Club receive a 15 percent discount when purchasing the current book club title at The Last Bookstore. For more information, email Natalie Green, [email protected].


A finalist for the 2017 PEN/Faulkner award, Sunil Yapa’s debut novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist was named one of the best books of 2016 by Amazon, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Bustle, and others. The winner of the 2010 Asian American short story award, Yapa’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, O Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Margins, Hyphen, Slice, LitHub, and others. He currently lives in Montreal, and teaches in the MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College. He recently released an album of music as part of a collaboration with the poet Brian Turner, 11 11 (Me, Smiling).

Melissa Chadburn has written for The Los Angeles Times, NYT Book Review, Buzzfeed, Poets & Writers, NYRB, and dozens other places. She is a contributing editor for The Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her essay, “The Throwaways,” received notable mention in Best American Essays and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Her debut novel, A Tiny Upward Shove, is forthcoming with Farrar, Straus and Giroux.