Events & Updates

Come hear me get into Catholic business with Alice McDermott

Hello friends—

This is just a quick update—though I hope to have a newsletter for you very soon.

On Wednesday, I will be speaking to Alice McDermott about her new novel Absolution at Books Are Magic. It’s a really wonderful book. A real novel with characters and human drama and objects and bodies, and all of my favorite things. It is also a novel with a moral imagination, which gives the characters the sense of life because they behave in a world where their actions have consequences, and they must consider the cost to their own happiness and the happiness of others before acting. That does not mean that they always behave well. Just to the contrary—they behave horribly sometimes because they have found a way to justify pursuing their own pleasure and ambitions at the expense of others. But because this is an Alice McDermott novel, those choices, while utterly human and understandable, reverberate through lives and communities and nations. Her characters speak and act like real people. They are funny and they are tender and they can be petty and mean and anxious and yearn for something just out of sight. It is not fussy or pretentious. I love this book. So much. And I’m so happy to get to talk to her about it. I’ve really admired her work for years now, and when I was asked to be in conversation with her, I yelped on the walking path in Central Park. I think it will be a wonderful conversation. I hope you will consider coming out.

The other thing I want to tell you about is that I was on It’s Been a Minute again to talk about The Gilded Age and the limits of the sentimental period drama. It was a fun conversation—Brittany is always a delight to talk to about anything—and we really got to dig deep on why we love period dramas and also the difficulty of the form when it comes to certain sectors of American history which have not yet been repurposed by the sentimental imagination. The pretext for the convo is that The Gilded Age is back and Brittany apparently liked my essay on the topic that I wrote for Substack last year.

Also, I don’t know if you were aware, but I published a short story at Joyland called “Warehouses.” It’s the second in a series of stories following a young man named Per, who works in a New York bookstore around the holiday season. This story picks up following a difficult night and traces the aftermath of a concussion that Per suffers and explores the difficulty of trying to connect with others as well as the weirdness of public performances of identity and self. And, I think it’s pretty funny. I wrote these Per stories earlier this year when I was trying to process some rather…difficult personal feelings and when I was trying to write fiction that was less pessimistic on the project of human connection. I wanted to write someone who was not so hemmed in by cynical social programming, someone almost naive and open to contact with others even though he doesn’t really know how to begin it. I wanted to write someone nice, for a change, easy to like, as I’ve been accused of writing a string of mean-spirited vipers (I don’t think that’s true, but the accusations have been made). The result is Per, and after a few stories, I really like him. I hope you’ll read it. The first story in the series will be out in Granta soon, so look for that.