TOM PIAZZA’S THE AUBURN CONFERENCE

Join us as Tom Piazza sits down with Nathaniel Rich for a freewheeling conversation about Piazza’s newest novel, The Auburn Conference, which historian Douglas Brinkley has called “an epic novel by one of America’s greatest writers.” Set in 1883 at a fictional writers’ conference in upstate New York, the novel gathers together Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and a cast of dozens for an onstage discussion about the future of America. Mary Gaitskill calls it “an unexpected combination of wit, passion, and intellect that lands with tremendous relevance,” and Roy Blount, Jr. calls it “the mother of all writers’ conferences.” It is sure to be one of the year’s most talked-about books!