Author: Jasmin Darznik, The Bohemians
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2022-03-16

Enjoy an evening with Jasmin Darznik who discusses her latest novel, The Bohemians, along with ties to San Francisco’s Montgomery Block, also known as the Monkey Block. The Monkey Blocks was a four-story artist colony that once stood where the Transamerica Pyramid is in downtown San Francisco. Before the spot became a symbol of wealth and power, it was a safe haven for artists and writers. 

Jasmin Darznik’s debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Los Angeles Times bestseller, longlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize and awarded the Writers’ Center’s First Novel Prize. Darznik is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her books have been published in seventeen countries. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a JD from the University of California, and a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family. 

The Bohemians follows young, naive Dorothea Lange as she seeks to reinvent herself in a new, bohemian city. Forming relationships with the vivacious Chinese American Caroline Lee, magnetic painter Maynard Dixon, Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, D. H. Lawrence and more, Dorothea discovers the power of her own voice and artistic vision.