The Center for Fiction Presents Angela Flournoy on The Wilderness with Brit Bennett and Raven Leilani

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT September 16, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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Angela Flournoy, critically acclaimed author of The Turner House, joins us to celebrate the highly anticipated release of her new novel, The Wilderness.

The Wilderness follows five Black women in their twenties—Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia—as they wrestle with profound questions reverberating through their lives: How do we reconcile the search for purpose and direction with the shifting stakes of maturity? How should friendship be prioritized in the face of these transformations? Set against the backdrops of New York and Los Angeles from the late 2000s through the 2020s, the novel navigates the uncertain metamorphosis of contemporary adulthood.

Flournoy will be joined in conversation by Brit Bennett, author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Vanishing Half, and Raven Leilani, author of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize-winning book Luster. Don’t miss this intimate exploration of modern connection and coming of age. After the event, Flournoy will sign books.

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In Conversation

  • Angela Flournoy author photo_Miranda Barnes Photographyjpg

    Angela Flournoy

    Angela Flournoy

    Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, an Indie Next Pick, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review, and she has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa, Princeton University, and UCLA. She lives in New York.


    Photo Credit: Miranda Barnes Photography

  • BritBennett_AuthorPic_EmmaTrim

    Brit Bennett

    Brit Bennett

    Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. Her debut novel The Mothers was a New York Times bestseller. Her essays have been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, the Paris Review, and Jezebel.


    Photo Credit: Emma Trim

  • Leilani, Raven - LUSTER author photo, credit Nina Subin

    Raven Leilani

    Raven Leilani

    Raven Leilani is the author of Luster. Leilani is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, the recipient of the 2020 Kirkus Prize, VCU Cabell Prize, NBCC John Leonard Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, Clark Fiction Prize, and The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Leilani’s work has been published in the New Yorker, N+1, Granta, the Yale Review, and the Cut, among other publications.


    Photo Credit: Nina Subin

Featured Book

  1. . 
    TheWilderness_HC

    The Wilderness

    By Angela Flournoy

    Published by HarperCollins

    PURCHASE

    Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

    Desiree and Danielle, sisters whose shared history has done little to prevent their estrangement, nurse bitter family wounds in different ways. January’s got a relationship with a “good” man she feels ambivalent about, even after her surprise pregnancy. Monique, a librarian and aspiring blogger, finds unexpected online fame after calling out the university where she works for its plans to whitewash fraught history. And Nakia is trying to get her restaurant off the ground, without relying on the largesse of her upper middle-class family who wonder aloud if she should be doing something better with her life.

    As these friends move from the late 2000s into the late 2020s, from young adults to grown women, they must figure out what they mean to one another—amid political upheaval, economic and environmental instability, and the increasing volatility of modern American life.

    The Wilderness is Angela Flournoy’s masterful and kaleidoscopic follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut The Turner House. A generational talent, she captures with disarming wit and electric language how the most profound connections over a lifetime can lie in the tangled, uncertain thicket of friendship.

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