Livonia Chow Mein: A Novel

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Friday, October 23, 2026 | 6pm to 7:30pm

25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Suite 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

In-Person: Coming Soon | Zoom: Coming Soon

Author Abigail Savitch-Lew will discuss her debut novel Livonia Chow Mein — a gripping, four-generation saga set in Brownsville, Brooklyn, centered on a Chinese family-owned restaurant and its deep roots in a neighborhood shaped by waves of immigrant and working-class communities. When two tenements on Livonia Avenue burn to the ground in 1978, killing one resident and displacing dozens of others, the novel’s central mystery ignites — pulling readers across a century of history to uncover what really happened and who was responsible. Savitch-Lew traces the intertwined lives of Chinese, Jewish, and Black families whose fates are bound together by a single block, a single restaurant, and the slow erasure of the communities they built. The novel contemplates themes of Black-Asian solidarity, displacement, and what it means to truly belong to a place.

Purchase Book: https://abigailsavitchlew.com/

Author Bio

Abigail Savitch-Lew is a writer of fiction and nonfiction and an American of Jewish and Chinese (Ashkenazi and Toisanese) descent. She holds a B.A. in Literary Arts from Brown University, and an M.F.A. in Fiction from Rutgers University-Newark. Her short stories have appeared in The Round, Post Road, The Best Teen Writing of 2010, and The Apprentice Writer, and in 2019 she was an Asian American Writers' Workshop Margins Fellow.

A former staff reporter for City Limits, her journalism and reporting have also appeared in The Appeal, YES! Magazine, Colorlines, The Nation, Dissent Magazine, Jacobin, Open City, The Red Hook Star-Revue, and Urban Omnibus. Her writing spans American history, social movements, racial capitalism, mental health care, and economic democracy.