Kyle Dillon Hertz celebrates the paperback launch of The Lookback Window with a night of readings from authors Megan Nolan, Aria Aber, and Adam Dalva.
About the Book.
A fearless debut novel of resilience, transcendence, and the elusive promise of justice.
Brooklyn, 2019. Dylan has lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking as a teen. Now years later—long after a police investigation that went nowhere with the domestic life he built to survive—the Child Victims Act opens up a way forward: a one-year window to sue past abusers, but once the lookback window starts, Dylan seeks answers everywhere: in the druggy reveries of Fire Island to the love-drunk strangers of summer nights downtown and the lawyers who watch over the park, finally emerging from an erotic and violent spiral with a new clarity of purpose: a righteous determination to gaze, unflinching, upon the brutal men whose faces have haunted him for a decade, and to extract justice on his own terms.
About the Readers.
Aria Aber was born and raised in Germany. Her poetry collection Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, and Granta. A graduate of the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was a Writers in Public Schools fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her first novel GOOD GIRL is forthcoming from Hogarth (US) and Bloomsbury (UK) in 2025, and will be translated into six languages. She is a contributing editor at The Yale Review, and will be joining the University of Vermont as an assistant professor of English in the fall of 2024.
Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books. He serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Rutgers University. Adam was the judge of the 2022 Story Prize, the Books Editor of Words Without Borders, and the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica.
Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland and is currently based in New York. Her debut novel Acts of Desperation was published in 2021 and was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, short-listed for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel Ordinary Human Failings was published in 2024 and was short-listed for the Nero Prize For Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Encore Award for Best Second Novel and long-listed for the Women’s prize. She is at work on a book of non-fiction.
Kyle Dillon Hertz is the author of The Lookback Window, a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His work can be found in Esquire, Freeman’s, Time, and more. He received his MFA from NYU and a residency from Yaddo. He teaches at The New School.