IALA, NAASR and the Zohrab Center to host Literary Lights 2025 featuring Nicole Haroutunian
The October edition of the Literary Lights 2025 reading series features Nicole Haroutunian, author of Choose This Now, in conversation with fellow writer, journalist and IALA founder Olivia Katrandjian. The virtual event, cosponsored by Literary Mama, will take place on October 19, 2025, at 9:00 a.m. Pacific/12:00 p.m. Eastern/ 8:00 p.m. AMT. Register here.
“I don’t know what to think about things unless we talk them out first.”
Inseparable friends Val-and-Tal are used to making their decisions together. But what happens when their choices become their own? CHOOSE THIS NOW, a novel-in-stories, illuminates the small moments that shape their lives across nearly twenty years. On Val’s 21st birthday — which falls on Halloween — a sudden act of violence interrupts a longed-for kiss. This unfinished moment haunts Val year after year until she materializes in a new town to confront her past. Tal, an aspiring painter, vacillates between dedicating herself to art and literally burning it all down. As they fall in and out of love, start and restart careers and become mothers, Valerie and Taline struggle to define themselves, with and without each other. CHOOSE THIS NOW takes on art, labor, romantic love, pregnancy and parenthood — and the role of friendship in forging a life.
Praise for the Book
Choose This Now is a sparkling, intimate look at women’s lives. Haroutunian’s succinct prose and characterizations, her expansive interconnected storylines and her deft hand in weaving together her themes — friendship, desire, striving, parenting, aging — make for a lovely reading experience. I was sad to leave these women and their ordinary, beautiful lives behind. I like to think of them out there in the world of art, continuing to orbit one another through every stage of our brief time on earth.” — Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State
“Nicole Haroutunian’s Choose This Now begins with alternating short stories about two best friends from college and goes on to create an entire world. The stories move through time — friendships and marriages and pregnancies and birth and also failed art projects and inappropriate police officers and more than one drunken party where bad decisions have enormous consequences. It’s a beautiful, beautiful book.” — Marcy Dermanksy, author of Hurricane Girl and Very Nice
“Nicole Haroutunian’s brilliant, wryly rendered novel-in-stories Choose This Now is knitted together by friendship, heartache and her great affection for her collage of compassionately drawn characters. The novel is filled with smart meditations on parenting, dating apps, sex and art and includes one wildly discrete suburban orgy. I enjoyed every word, loved all the women who inhabited its pages and inhaled every twist and turn.” — Bethany Ball, author of The Pessimists and What to Do About the Solomons
Nicole Haroutunian is the author of the novel-in-stories CHOOSE THIS NOW (Noemi Press, 2024), named one of the best story collections of the year by Electric Literature and the story collection SPEED DREAMING (Little a, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Story, The Georgia Review and elsewhere. She hosts and programs the reading series “Story Time” for Caregivers at the Astoria Bookshop, works in museum education and lives with her family in Woodside, Queens, in New York City.
Olivia Katrandjian is a writer and journalist published in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Oxford Review of Books, Ms. Magazine and elsewhere. Her writing was anthologized in We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora. Her fiction was listed for Luxembourg’s National Literary Prize, the Bristol and Cambridge Short Story Prizes, the Oxford-BNU Award and the Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction. A 2021 Creative Armenia-AGBU fellow, she studied creative writing at Oxford University and is the founder of the International Armenian Literary Alliance.
Literary Lights 2025 is a monthly reading series organized by IALA, the National Association for Armenian Studies and Research and the Krikor and Clara Zohrab Information Center. Each event — held online or in-person — will feature a writer reading from their work, followed by a discussion with an interviewer and audience members. Keep an eye on our website and socials for the exact dates of each event. Read along with the series by purchasing titles from the IALA Bookstore powered by Bookshop.
Missed the latest Literary Lights 2025 event featuring author of Waterline Aram Mrjoian. Watch the full recording here.
