Description
Eagle Harbor Book Co. is pleased to welcome Adam Ross —acclaimed author of Mr. Peanut and editor of The Sewanee Review—for a discussion of his new novel Playworld. This is a free in-person event, however, we encourage you to RSVP below in order to assure your seat. Pre-order your copy before the event and save 10%, then join us on Tuesday, January 14.
New York City in the 1980s. A time of class struggle, political shifts, and the enticing lure of fame and ambition. For over-loaded high-schooler Griffin Hurt, it’s also a time of ever-building pressures with no shortage of questionable outlets. Griffin attempts to navigate the uncertain landscape he finds himself in with a conflicted sense of who he should be looking to for guidance. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. A blend of unflinchingly heavy and comedically clever, wrapped in themes of 1980s excess, impulse, and inattention, Playworld immerses readers in Griffin’s pursuit of solutions to problems that should be far out of a teenager’s reach.
Adam Ross is the author of Mr. Peanut, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review.
Reviews for Playworld:
“Playworld is an astonishing, immersive novel that deserves a place in the pantheon of Great New York Novels. I loved this book for its textures, its music, and its moral accounting of ordinary life and ordinary time. And the characters! What characters! This is a late-breaking classic and might very well be Ross’s masterpiece.” —Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
“A wonderful, full-bodied, modern-yet-old-school novel that brings the New York City of the 1980s to vibrant life. Ross will make you laugh and break your heart. I haven’t felt this immersed in a work of fiction in a long time.” —Harlan Coben, author of Think Twice
"A modern masterpiece, sharp and breathtaking and wise. Griffin, the young man at the center of this vivid bildungsroman, is someone you’d follow forward and backward and anywhere—across the sweaty mats of the high schoolwrestling team into a steamed-up car for a wildly sexy and heartbreakinglyhuman relationship with an older, married woman, and then into the glittering world of child acting. Remarkable." —Lisa Taddeo, author of Three Women
“Compulsively readable.” —Publishers Weekly
"In this magnificent novel, Adam Ross pulls off a literary hat trick: Playworld is at once an elegy for a very particular time and place, an intimate portrait of one family that then sweeps the reader into a multitude of fascinating worlds, and a tour-de-force of a coming of age story with an unforgettable boy at its center. I loved it.” —Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires
“An epic bildungsroman . . . While Griffin comes to understand the abuses inflicted on him, Ross' novel is free of lessons, as unjudging as poor Griffin, who can do nothing but weather the loss of innocence we can all see overtaking him like a cloud. Ross offers surprising narrative flights, stunning passages, and a nostalgia-soaked setting in so-real-you're there, bygone New York City.” —Annie Bostrom, Booklist
"Dazzling and endearing . . . Gorgeously textured and frequently very funny, [Playworld] revels in all the heady, scuzzy, confusing bits of coming of age." —Vogue