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Join Pilsen Community Books as they welcome Loubna Mrie and Anand Gopal to the store for a conversation on their new books, Defiance and Days of Love and Rage, moderated by Wendy Pearlman.

Bringing together two distinct yet deeply connected perspectives on Syria and the broader Middle East, Mrie and Gopal examine what it means to stand up, resist, and survive in times of war and upheaval. Drawing on memoir and reportage, they explore how the personal and political are inseparable shaping individual lives as well as the course of the region itself. This conversation will reflect on what these experiences reveal about the current wars and the uncertainty unfolding across the Middle East, and what it means to endure, document, and make sense of violence in its aftermath.

Loubna Mrie is a Syrian writer and journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic. She is the author of Defiance.

Anand Gopal is a journalist and academic, Pulitzer Prize finalist, and contributing writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of Days of Love and Rage.

Wendy Pearlman is a professor of political science at Northwestern University and a leading scholar of the Syrian uprising, refugee experiences, and Middle East politics. She is the author of We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled and The Home I Worked to Make.