First Novel Friday: The Oldest Bitch Alive, American Han, and Ruins, Child

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Friday, 6:00 pm EDT April 3, 2026

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Members of The Center for Fiction receive free tickets to First Novel Fridays 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 pleased to welcome debut novelists Morgan Day (The Oldest Bitch Alive), Lisa Lee (American Han), and Giada Scodellaro (Ruins, Child). April’s novels ask what it means to stay, to leave, and to become someone new—within friendships, families, and the wider world. Joseph Earl Thomas, winner of The Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize for God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, will join us as the evening’s moderator. We hope you’ll support our featured authors by buying 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 $40+ 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.

Featuring

Morgan Day

Morgan Day

Morgan Day is a fiction and architecture writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Ecotone, Gulf Coast, the Southampton Review, Worms Magazine, and elsewhere. The Oldest Bitch Alive is her first novel.

Photo Credit: Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya
Lisa Lee

Lisa Lee

Lisa Lee is the recipient of the 2023 Marianne Russo Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize. She has received other fellowships and awards from Kundiman, Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Korea Foundation. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, VIDA, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Lee holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles and grew up in Napa, California.

Photo Credit: Huy Doan
Giada Scodellaro

Giada Scodellaro

Giada Scodellaro is the author of the collection Some of Them Will Carry Me (Dorothy, a publishing project), named one of the New Yorker’s best books of 2022. Her writings have appeared in or are forthcoming from the New Yorker, BOMB, Harper’s, Granta, and the Chicago Review of Books, among others. She is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University. Winner of The Novel Prize, her debut novel, Ruins, Child, will be simultaneously published by New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), and Giramondo (AU) in early 2026.
Joseph Earl Thomas

Joseph Earl Thomas

Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink, a memoir; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, winner of The Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach. His work has been published or is forthcoming in the Paris Review, the Verge, Vanity Fair, Harper’s, the Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program, he also earned his PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Literature, and Video Games at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Photo Credit: Marcus Jackson

Featured Books

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The Oldest Bitch Alive

By Morgan Day

Published by Astra Publishing House

PURCHASE

Gelsomina is a French Bulldog who leads a routine life in a glass house. One day, she ingests an orb of parasitic worms who make an imperfect home inside her. Approaching death, yet filled with new life, she begins to see everything differently: her attachment to the designer-architect couple with whom she lives; the naive preoccupations of their younger French Bulldog, Zampanò; her feelings for an elusive fox; and the voids within and beyond her. The worms propel Gelsomina to plumb the meaning of her domestic existence and ask if her rebirth lies in the wild unknown outside the panes.

The Oldest Bitch Alive is a polyphonic story of containment refracting across scales. Revolving perspectives meditate on consciousness, theories of everything, multispecies narratives, philosophies of form and the immaterial, and other ways in which matter is composed and consumed. Gelsomina’s introspections culminate in an ecstatic sprint through a natural world she’s never seen, awakening the French Bulldog to the depths of love, reverence, death, and the bound self in dichromatic color.
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American Han

By Lisa Lee

Published by Little, Brown and Company

PURCHASE

Jane and her brother Kevin Kim embody the model minority myth until both depart from the path: Jane drops out of law school without telling her parents, and her brother Kevin gives up his promising tennis career and cuts himself off from the family. Their parents feel equally lost in a country that claims to support them and yet in which they can find no place. When Kevin goes missing, no one recognizes his absence as the warning sign it is, until it erupts in a moment that indicts them all.

Both deeply serious and absurdly funny, American Han is a story about striving and assimilation, difficult love, and family fidelity. A searing and probing portrait that challenges assumptions about the immigrant experience, Lisa Lee’s debut introduces a powerful new voice on the literary landscape.

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Ruins, Child

By Giada Scodellaro

Published by New Directions

PURCHASE

Set in what may be the future, and centered on six women sharing a space in some sort of crumbling apartment tower, Ruins, Child is remarkable for its irresistible sweep, wit, and prickly splintered truth. Like a precious old mirror that’s been dropped, it’s a book that is looking up at you, flashing light and bits of the undeniable. With the pulsating sway of its liquid mosaic narrative, the novel may recall Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, but is entirely its own animal: kaleidoscopic, pointedly disorienting in its looseness, and powered along by snatches of speech from its compelling ensemble cast, often vernacular, often overheard: “The woman is old, I hear children saying nearby, not in the way we consider all adults to be old, but really old, ancient, she is endless.” It’s a book seemingly drawn from deep wells of Black American reality: her female protagonists push back against authority in the very vivacity of their telling, setting afoot a freeing-up and a mysterious inversion of marginalization. “Looseness, that is the thing people fear in a person (in women) and in objects.” A surreal musing, Ruins, Child uses the lens of urban infrastructure, botany, social commentary, folklore, choreography, and collective listening to create an ethnography of place and an ode to communal ruins.