JUST PUBLISHED -- THE AUBURN CONFERENCE
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Tom's first new novel in eight years has been called "an epic novel by one of America's greatest writers" (Douglas Brinkley), a "combination of wit, passion, and intellect that lands with tremendous relevance" (Mary Gaitskill), and "an ebullient work of loving homage, pitch-perfect ventriloquism, and drawing-room farce that unfolds into an examination of grand American questions: What, finally, is America? And does it deserve to be saved?" (Nathaniel Rich).
It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of America. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.
"Who wouldn't want to go to this conference?" -- Greil Marcus
"Piazza’s bravura satire and fluent literary ventriloquism are razor-sharp and hilarious, while the feuds he orchestrates over freedom, the Constitution, race, women’s rights, democracy, art, and the predominance of lies over truth are all too timely." -- Booklist (starred review)
"To read The Auburn Conference is to be there, listening, raising one's hand, nodding one's head, or even rising to one's feet in protest or applause." -- Yusef Komunyakaa
"Both witty and intellectually acute, this is a powerful novel." -- Roxana Robinson
"The mother of all writers' conferences. Piazza doesn't force anything, and he doesn't miss a trick." -- Roy Blount Jr.
Available now at your favorite independent bookstore or online retailer
