Excerpt from Discipline by Larissa Pham, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Chapter 1

Clemins

I was running late, and by the time I got to the gate they were asking people to check their bags because the overhead compartments were full. I was late because I love being in airports—that floating, anonymous feeling—and I had lingered too long at a café, thinking I had arrived early enough to sit with a coffee. I hadn't, so on the jet bridge I turned over my suitcase and boarded the plane.

After we landed, I went to the baggage claim and stood, waiting, for thirty minutes until I realized someone else had taken my bag. There was a black hard-shell suitcase going around on the belt but it wasn't mine, and I felt a sudden lightness, a disorientation. By this point I was late again, so after talking to the airline, I took the elevated train to just north of the city, where I was giving a reading at a university. While I was on the train, my phone rang.

The person who took your bag called to let us know they have it, the airline representative said. He's offering to return it to you, or he can bring it to the airport and you can pick it up there.

I'm fine with meeting him, I said. I pressed a fingertip against my free ear to block out the noise of the train.

I gave the representative permission to share my phone number and stepped onto the exposed platform. A hard wind was blowing over the water. When I turned to look at the shore, a few blocks in the distance, I knew it was a lake, but it extended so far into the horizon it seemed like the ocean. Because it was freshwater, the tides were smaller, I assumed, and posed less of a danger to construction, and so the city was built right up to its edge. That seemed wrong to me. The city felt perched on the lip of nothingness, a settlement on the bank of infinity.

The reading was in a handsome Gothic building set on the quad. It was the first stop on my book tour—I used tour euphemistically, usually when talking to strangers or acquaintances about my trip. I had written a novel, my first, and it had been published by a small press in the spring. Shortly before the book was to come out, my relationship of five years ended. Then I had wanted nothing more than to leave my own life. By cobbling together speaking fees from universities, which had recently reopened to in-person events, and relying on the goodwill of friends here and there for a place to stay, I was able to plan a loose itinerary, moving in stops across the country. I had never traveled through America like this. After my ex moved out, I busied myself with booking events and finding a subletter for the time I would be away from our apartment, which was now solely my apartment, and which I could not afford on my own. This was an issue, I knew, that would become only more pressing with time, but with the month's rent secured and a subletter installed, I packed my suitcase and departed.

The reading went well. I read from a scene early in the book, the one I had decided I would read at all my events, a scene where the artist is in her studio, waiting for something or someone to arrive. Then I gave a short talk. After, there was a question and answer session with the professor who had invited me to campus, and then the discussion opened up to the students. Though I was still relatively new to the business of being a working writer, I liked speaking at schools—the Q&A always seemed more lively, with higher stakes. I liked seeing the serious faces of the students as they listened, and I liked the way they asked questions that were nearly exclusively occupied with the structures of their own lives. There was something sweet about their solipsism, to witness how visibly they were constructing their convictions, which after this interval might remain in place for years.

Near the end of the event, a student in the front row raised her hand and waited for the mic to come her way. A tiny silver cross glittered at her throat.

Excerpted from Discipline by Larissa Pham. Copyright © 2026 by Larissa Pham. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.