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Dana Spiotta
July 8, 2021 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT
reading from her new novel
Wayward
published by Alfred Knopf
A moving, funny, engrossing novel about mothers and daughters, and one woman’s midlife reckoning, from the renowned author of Stone Arabia and Eat the Document
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required
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(CLICK HERE) to register. (link to be posted soon!)
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon!)
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On the heels of the election of 2016, Samantha Raymond’s life begins to come apart: her mother is ill, her teenage daughter is increasingly remote, and at fifty-two she finds herself staring into “the Mids”–that hour of supreme wakefulness between three and four in the morning in which women of a certain age suddenly find themselves contemplating motherhood, mortality, and, in this case, the state of our unraveling nation.
Dana Spiotta’s Wayward is a stunning novel about aging, about the female body, and about female difficulty–female complexity–in the age of Trump. Probing and provocative, brainy and sensual, it is a testament to our weird, off-kilter America, to reforms and resistance and utopian wishes, and to the beauty of ruins. Tremendous new work from one of the most gifted writers of her generation.
Dana Spiotta is the author of Innocents and Others, which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was short-listed for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Stone Arabia, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Eat the Document, which was a National Book Award finalist; and Lightning Field. Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the John Updike Prize in Literature. Spiotta lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.
Praise for the work of Dana Spiotta
“An urgent, deeply moving, wholly original novel by one of the most wildly talented writers in America. This is Spiotta’s best book yet, rich with all the joyful immersion-in-culture that characterized her earlier work, and of which she is a master, but with, it seems to me, more heart, hope, and urgency. There’s not a smarter, more engaging, more celebratory writer working today than Dana Spiotta, and here she shows us to ourselves with stunning, sometimes lacerating, honesty, but also with a feeling of genuine hope for us, i.e., with kindness. I finished the book last night and woke this morning both fonder of, and more terrified for, America.”
—George Saunders
“A dazzling lightning bolt of a novel which illuminates the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes heartbreaking moments of connection and disconnection in our lives. What begins as a vertiginous leap into hilarious rabbit holes ends as a brilliant meditation on mortality and time. How does she do it? Only Dana Spiotta knows. I’m just happy to see her work her magic.”
—Jenny Offill
“What a thrilling experience to take a wayward journey along with Dana Spiotta’s heroine, in the social landscape of America when America is probing its future, in a woman’s complex internal landscape as she forges forward. Wayward is a fiercely funny and deliciously subversive novel.”
—Yiyun Li
“Wayward is a strikingly human and affecting story… gloriously cool, deftly assembled, brimming with mood… a hymn to iconoclasm, a piercing novel about what we lose and gain by when we step out of life’s deepest worn grooves.”
—Vogue‘s “Best Books to Read in 2021”
Sponsored by the City Lights Foundation