Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with Ru Freeman to discuss and celebrate the release of Bon Courage: Essays on Inheritance, Citizenship, and a Creative Life. She will be in conversation with scholar and writer Khury Petersen-Smith.

A fierce, eclectic, and intimate collection that encompasses the big questions of our time: what we mean by courage, how we define our world, how we choose to exist in it. 

Bon Courage is an exhilarating journey through a layered intellectual landscape textured with a range of political and personal enthusiasms, and emboldened by a passionate defense of the disregarded. Wide ranging and inclusive in the essay mode, deep and revealing as a memoir, with the dynamics and layering of great fiction. As if that’s not enough, it sings. Ru Freeman participates intimately while bringing global perspectives to subjects as diverse as Bowie and Dylan, Palestine, 9/11, hairstyles, personal and cultural identity, motherhood and #MeToo. A resplendent and compendious exploration of great empathy, insight, and bon courage indeed. This is a book that is going to make a difference.

Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan and American writer, poet, and activist whose work appears internationally in English and in translation. She is the author of the short-story collection, Sleeping Alone, and the essay collection, Bon Courage, and the novels A Disobedient Girl and On Sal Mal Lane, a New York Times Editor's Choice Book. She is the editor of the anthology,  Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine and co-editor of Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared Security. She writes for the Guardian, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe. She is a winner of the Mariella Gable Award for Fiction, and the JH Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She teaches creative writing in the US and abroad.

Moderator Khury Petersen-Smith works with others to ask good questions about US empire and develop strategies to contribute to its undoing. He is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, where he does research and activist strategy. He is especially interested in the relationships between freedom struggles around the world and those here for demilitarization and decolonization. He lives in Boston.