First Novel Friday: Little Movements, First Time, Long Time, and Pick a Color

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Friday, 6:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT October 3, 2025

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Members of The Center for Fiction receive free tickets to First Novel Friday and early access to registration. Become a member today. Already a member? RSVP here.

On the first Friday of the month, join us as we celebrate and launch a selection of the best debut novels published today. Be among the first to discover boundary-pushing and world-expanding work from exciting new voices in fiction.

Kick off the weekend with a happy hour at our cash bar for ticket holders in our Members Lounge starting at 6pm. Then, at 7pm, we’ll move to our auditorium for readings from the featured debut novelists, followed by a short moderated conversation. The party continues with book signings and signature cocktails to round out the night. Go home with something new—a book, a friend, a favorite Friday night tradition.

This month, we are thrilled to welcome Lauren Morrow, Amy Silverberg, and Souvankham Thammavongsa alongside the evening’s moderator, author Maris Kreizman (I Want to Burn This Place Down). October’s debuts explore creative fulfillment within racialized spaces, the resilience inherent in immigrant labor, and the intricate journeys of grief and self-discovery, all converging on the theme of what it means to claim one’s voice. We hope you will support our featured debut novelists by purchasing their books at the event (purchase all three for 15% off). Space is limited, so reserve your spot today!

We offer two in-person ticket options: the $5 Community Ticket and the $15+ Supporter Ticket. Both provide the same access, but if you’re able, we kindly suggest registering for the Supporter Ticket to help sustain our programs for emerging writers.

October’s Featured Debuts:

Little Movements by Lauren Morrow
Little Movements follows Layla Smart, a thirty-something dancer from Brooklyn, who accepts a nine-month residency as a choreographer at Briar House, an elite arts center in rural Vermont. Leaving behind her job, friends, and husband, Layla is determined to create a career-defining performance with a group of Black dancers in a predominantly white town. As she faces the challenges of institutional bias, creative pressure, and complex new relationships, her marriage begins to unravel. This powerful debut offers a clear-eyed look at the tensions between personal ambition and belonging, asking what it means to make art on your own terms.

First Time, Long Time by Amy Silverberg
Hoping to escape her grief and finally become a writer, First Time, Long Time’s protagonist, Allison, moves to Los Angeles. Instead of finding success, she feels stuck, unproductive, and is barely scraping by as an English teacher. When she meets Reid Steinman, a once-famous radio host beloved by her late brother and emotionally distant father, she’s pulled into a relationship that quickly blurs her sense of self. Then she meets Maddie, Reid’s magnetic daughter, and their connection becomes something deeper and more confusing. As Allison’s attraction to both father and daughter intensifies, she’s forced to confront the unresolved grief that shaped her and decide what it means to live a life that’s truly hers.

Pick a Color by Souvankham Thammavongsa
Ning, a retired Laotian boxer, now owns a Toronto nail salon where every employee wears a name tag that reads “Susan” to placate the mostly white, wealthy clientele. Over the course of a single summer day, Ning files nails, listens to gossip, and silently observes the unspoken hierarchies between workers and customers, and among the Susans themselves. Beneath her quiet exterior is a sharp, restless mind, one that carries the weight of past ambitions and present compromises. With precision and wit, Pick a Color explores the complexities of immigrant labor, class performance, and the emotional cost of being invisible in plain sight.

In Conversation

Lauren Morrow

Lauren Morrow

Lauren Morrow studied dance and creative writing at Connecticut College and earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She was a Kimbilio Fellow, an Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow, and the recipient of two Hopwood Awards, among other prizes. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares and the South Carolina Review. She worked in publicity at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and is now a publicity manager at Dutton, Plume, and Tiny Reparations Books. Originally from St. Louis, she lives in Brooklyn.

Photo Credit: Kate Enman
Amy Silverberg

Amy Silverberg

Amy Silverberg is a writer and comedian. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing & Literature from USC. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, the Paris Review, Granta, the Idaho Review, TriQuarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her stand-up has been featured on Comedy Central, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. She also writes television, most recently for The Movie Show on the SYFY Channel.

Photo Credit: John-Michael Bond
Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham Thammavongsa

Souvankham Thammavongsa was born in the Lao refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand, and was raised and educated in Toronto, where she now lives. She is the author of four poetry books and the short-story collection How to Pronounce Knife, winner of the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize and 2021 Trillium Book Award, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN America Open Book Award. Her stories have won an O. Henry Award and appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s magazine, the Paris Review, the Atlantic, Granta, and NOON.

Photo Credit: Steph Martyniuk
Maris Kreizman

Maris Kreizman

Maris Kreizman is the author of I Want to Burn This Place Down (Ecco Books, 2025). She’s an essayist and columnist for Literary Hub whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and Esquire. She hosted The Maris Review, an intimate author interview podcast, from 2018 to 2023. A former board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she has served as a judge for the annual NBCC Awards as well as for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She was previously the editorial director of Book of the Month, the editorial director of digital content at barnesandnoble.com, and a publishing outreach lead at Kickstarter. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and her books.

Photo Credit: Mindy Tucker

Featured Books

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Little Movements

By Lauren Morrow

Published by Random House Publishing Group

PURCHASE

Layla Smart was raised by her pragmatic Midwestern mother to dream medium. But all Layla’s ever wanted is a career in dance, which requires dreaming big. So when she receives a prestigious offer to be the choreographer-in-residence at Briar House, an arts program in rural Vermont, she leaves behind Brooklyn, her job, her friends, and her husband to pursue it.

Navigating Briar House and the small, white town that surrounds it proves difficult—Layla wants to create art for art’s sake and resist tokenization, but the institution’s director keeps encouraging Layla to dig deep into her people’s history. Still, the mental and physical demands of dancing spark a sharp, unexpected sense of joy, bringing into focus the years she’d distanced herself from her true calling for the sake of her marriage and maintaining the status quo.

Just as she begins to see her life more clearly, she discovers a betrayal that proves the cracks in her marriage were deeper than she ever could have known. Then Briar House’s dangerously problematic past comes to light. And Layla discovers she’s pregnant. Suddenly, dreaming medium sounds a lot more appealing.

Poignant, propulsive, and darkly funny, Little Movements is a novel about self-discovery, about what we must endure—or let go of—in order to realize our dreams.
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First Time, Long Time

By Amy Silverberg

Published by Grand Central Publishing

PURCHASE

Aspiring writer and all-around naive person Allison expected her life to finally take shape when she moved to Los Angeles. After years grieving her brother’s untimely death and allowing her mercurial father’s feelings and desires to infect her own, she feels ready to become the main character in her own story again. But in LA, as with anywhere else, she’s rudderless, unable to write and barely scraping by as an English teacher.

So when she has a serendipitous run in with famed radio personality Reid Steinman, an idol of her father’s and her late brother’s, she’s eager to see where their relationship might go, and who she might become. Caught in his thrall, she falls back into her old self-effacing patterns, struggling to maintain the boundaries of her own identity. Suddenly, an unanticipated lifeline emerges: an intoxicating tryst with Reid’s adult daughter, Maddie. She’s forced to balance her romance with Reid with her gnawing desire for the intoxicatingly charming Maddie, as it becomes increasingly evident that she and Allison’s late brother share more than a few qualities.

Through candid self-awareness, keen observations, and deliciously wry humor, First Time, Long Time asks, what happens to a young woman’s goals when she becomes involved with a famous man whose needs seem so much louder than her own? And how might she move forward when so much in her past remains unresolved?

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Pick a Color

By Souvankham Thammavongsa

Published by Little Brown and Company

PURCHASE

“I live in a world of Susans. I got name tags for everyone who works at this nail salon, and on every one is printed the name ‘Susan.'”

Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer’s day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous intellect and profound complexity. A woman enthralled by the intricacy and rhythms of her work, but also haunted by memories of paths not taken and opportunities lost. A woman navigating the complex power dynamics among her fellow Susans, whose greatest fears and desires lie just behind the gossip they exchange.

As the day’s work grinds on, the friction between Ning’s two identities—as anonymous manicurist and brilliant observer of her own circumstances—will gather electric and crackling force, and at last demand a reckoning with the way the world of privilege looks at a woman like Ning.

Told over a single day with razor-sharp precision and wit, Pick a Color confirms Souvankham Thammavongsa’s place as literature’s premier chronicler of the immigrant experience, in its myriad, complex, and slyly subversive forms.