A Room of One's Own is thrilled to welcome Emily Zhou and Soula Emmanuel for a reading and conversation on both their new releases Girlfriends and Wild Geese.

In seven light-filled prisms of short stories, Emily Zhou chronicles modern queer life with uncompromising and hilarious lucidity. Attending to the intimacy of Gen Z women’s lives, these stories move from the provinces to the metropolis, from chaotic student accommodation to insecure jobs, from parties to dates to the nights after, from haplessness to some kind of power.

Funny and devastating, like a trans Mary McCarthy, Zhou depicts with shocking precision the choices and shifts through which we work on each other and ourselves. Tender, merciless, and gracious, Girlfriends is a breath of fresh air.

NEW YORK, NY—Phoebe Forde has a new home, a new name, and is newly thirty. An Irish transplant and PhD candidate, she’s overeducated and underpaid, but finally settling into her new life in Copenhagen. Almost three years into her gender transition, Phoebe has learned to move through the world carefully, savoring small moments of joy. After all, a woman without a past can be anyone she wants. But an unexpected visit from her ex-girlfriend Grace brings back memories of Dublin and the life she thought she’d left behind. Over the course of a weekend, their romance rekindles into something sweet and radically unfamiliar as Grace helps Phoebe navigate the jagged edges of nostalgia and hope.

Written with wit and warmth, Wild Geese is a tale of dislocations and relocations, encounters, and accidents: a novel of past lives, messy feelings, and the desire to start afresh.

Emily Zhou was born in Michigan and lives in New York City. Girlfriends is her first book.

Soula Emmanuel is a trans writer who was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Greek father. She attended university in Ireland and Sweden, graduating with a masters in demography which she likes to think inspired her interest in society’s outliers. She has written for IMAGE magazine, Rogue Collective, and the Project Arts Centre, and has had fiction published by The Liminal Review. She was longlisted for Penguin’s WriteNow program in 2020, took part in the Stinging Fly fiction summer school in 2021, and was a participant in the Madeleine Milburn Literary Agency’s mentorship program for 2021–22. She currently lives on Ireland’s east coast.

An Evening with EMILY ZHOU & SOULA EMMANUEL