Lisa Halliday (b. 1976) grew up in Massachusetts and has lived in Italy since 2011. Her work has appeared in Granta and The Paris Review and she received a Whiting Award for Fiction in 2017. Her first novel, Asymmetry, will be published in twenty languages and was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2018 by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, and several other publications. Asymmetry was also one of President Obama's favorite books of the year and was shortlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize, and the Prix du Premier Roman.
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AsymmetryA Novel
So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
Asymmetry:A Novel -
AsymmetryA Novel
Do you have it with you?
I bent down to unzip my backpack. When I’d pulled it out and handed it to her the officer began turning the pages of my second passport slowly, by the edges, like you handle a postcard whose ink isn’t yet dry.
When do you use this?
Very rarely.
But under what circumstances?
Whenever I enter or leave Iraq.
And does that give you an advantage?
What sort of an advantage?
You tell me.
If you had two passports, I said evenly, wouldn’t you use your British one whenever entering or leaving the UK?
Of course, she said. That’s the law. But I don’t know what the law is in Iraq, now do I?
I didn’t mean to, but I smiled. And faintly, she flinched. Then, still holding my second passport—which is to say the only passport I had left—she nodded slowly, comprehendingly, tapped it lightly once on her knee, and stood up and walked away.
Asymmetry:A Novel -
AsymmetryA Novel
In the night, she awoke three times. The first time, he was lying on his back, while beyond him the skyline was still glittering and the top of the Empire State Building was floodlit in red and gold.
The second time, he was on his side, facing away from her. Alice’s head hurt, so she got up and went to the bathroom to look for an aspirin. Someone had turned the Empire State Building off.
The third time she woke up, he had his arms around her from behind and was holding on to her tightly.
The fourth time, it was morning. Their faces were close, almost touching, and his eyes were already open, staring into hers.
“This,” he said grimly, “was a very bad idea.”
Asymmetry:A Novel
Selected Works
Lisa Halliday’s singular and beautifully-written novel is impossible to put down, and to pin down. It shifts before our eyes from the tale of a literary-world, May-December love affair to the first-person account of an Iraqi-American economist detained at Heathrow Airport. She treats these characters with such integrity and respect they seem corporeal. Nothing, we realize, is as it seems, and it’s deeply affecting to discover not only how Halliday’s narratives resolve but how they connect to one another. She has written a bold, elegant examination of the dynamics of love, power, ambition, and the ways we try to find our place in the world, whether at 25 or 75. Her crisply crafted sentences exude the inviting quiet of an assured artist – all this while posing arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.