Hannah Lillith Assadi Discusses Paradiso 17 with Cherien Dabis

BPL Presents welcomes novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi to discuss Paradiso 17, the intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope. Assadi will be in conversation with filmmaker Cherien Dabis.

All his life, exile has been the shadow stitched to the sole of Sufien’s shoe. Born in Palestine on the precipice of 1948’s Nakba, Sufien is forced to leave the only home he’s ever known, the one on the hill with a beautiful blue door. This is the precise moment when time stops making sense. He spends the rest of his life propelled forward, always on the way—although in search of what, he is never quite sure. In the dusty, oil-rich desert of Kuwait, he meets his first love and decides he must leave his family. In a small Italian university town, he spends his youth wrapped up in the sweet promise of the West and the forgetful assurance of wine. When life takes him to a gritty New York, he discovers his true vocation and falls for a Jewish woman born into a wholly different world. Finally, he finds himself recalled to the wild, vast open skies of the desert, in Arizona.

Sufien’s life spans friendships lost and maintained, a stint selling leathers at a tanner’s stall, the ineffable company of cats, and the freedom of the open road, the glowing pride of fatherhood, Sufi myths, prophetic dreams, and visions of the afterlife—and always, always, no matter how far he chases joy, the sweet, treacherous song of a balcony urging him to fly, to fall, to fall. The lyrical pages of Paradiso 17 weave in and out of time and space, beginning at the end and ending at the beginning. They are haunting, haunted with grief, struck through, as Dante once wrote, with “the arrow that the bow of exile/shoots first,” and yet they throb with light—not just the light that Sufien sees as he approaches his own end, but the brilliant light of a life lived.

Like all of our dead, Sufien still speaks, the book begins. Listen, this is his story.

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PARTICIPANTS

Hannah Lillith Assadi, a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, teaches fiction at the Columbia University School of the Arts and the Pratt Institute. She is the author of Sonora, which received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her second novel, The Stars Are Not Yet Bells, was a New Yorker and NPR best book of 2022. Raised in Arizona, she lives in Brooklyn, New York. Photo credit Jordan Ledy

Cherien Dabis is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker and actress who is widely recognized as a pioneer of Arab American storytelling. Her latest feature, All That’s Left of You, which she wrote, directed, produced, and stars in, world-premiered to critical acclaim at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The film has since won multiple top honors, including the Golden Gate Award and Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature at the San Francisco International Film Festival, the GIO Audience Award for Best International Feature at the Sydney Film Festival, and both Best Film and Best Screenplay at the Malaysia International Film Festival. It recently received an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best International Film, and was shortlisted for International Film Feature in the 98th annual Academy Awards.

Dabis first broke through with her groundbreaking debut feature Amreeka, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival before winning the coveted FIPRESCI International Critics Prize in the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes. She followed with her second feature, May in the Summer, which also marked her acting debut opposite Bill Pullman and Alia Shawkat. The film opened the 2013 Sundance Film Festival after earning the prestigious Sundance/NHK International Filmmaker Award. In television, Dabis has directed and executive produced acclaimed episodes of the Golden Globe-winning series Ramy and guest-starred in Netflix’s Gotham and Peabody Award-winning comedy Mo. In 2022, she earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series for the celebrated “Boy From 6B” episode of Hulu’s hit series Only Murders in the Building. She went on to direct standout episodes in seasons two and three, as well as episodes of Netflix’s Ozark. As an actress, Dabis can also be seen in Prime Video’s Fallout and Tarik Saleh’s Eagles of the Republic, which premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Photo credit Stephanie Diani