Author Event! John Kenney & Shalom Auslander

About the book:

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER · One of NPR’s Book We Love 2025 · A Gotham Book Prize Finalist · An Indie Next & LibraryReads Pick · AudioFiles Earphones Award Winner · Library Journal | Audio "Editor's Picks of the Year” · 2026 Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List Pick
"Razor-sharp, darkly comedic, and emotionally piercing. With the satirical bite of Richard Russo’s Straight Man, the introspection of Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove, and the reinvention of Andrew Sean Greer's Less, Kenney’s vivid prose transforms the mundane into unexpected hilarity."
—Booklist (starred review)
Obituary writer Bud Stanley isn’t really living his best life. He’s fallen into a funk after a divorce. (She left him for another man, who, in fairness, was far more interesting.) He’s not doing his job well. He’s given up on dating. And he’s about to be fired for accidentally publishing his own obituary one mildly drunken night (though technically the company can’t legally fire a dead person).
As Bud awaits his fate at work, he does the only logical thing: He goes to the wakes and funerals of total strangers to learn how to live again.

About the authors:

John Kenney is the New York Times bestselling author of Love Poems for Married People and the novels Talk to Me and Truth in Advertising, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He is a longtime contributor to The New Yorker and lives in Larchmont, New York.

Shalom Auslander is an internationally acclaimed writer of fiction, non-fiction, theater, TV and film. His memoir Foreskin’s Lament was a NY Times Best Book of the Year, and his novel Hope: A Tragedy was named one of the “10 Best Novels of the Decade” by the Sunday Times, and a finalist for the 2013 James Thurber Prize. His novel Mother for Dinner was named by The Economist and the Sunday Times as a Best Novel of the Year and his latest book, Feh, won the 2026 James Thurber Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 National Jewish Book Award.
He is the creator and writer of Showtime’s Happyish, starring Kathryn Hahn and Steve Coogan and is a long-time contributor to NPR’s This American Life as well as The Moth. He has published fiction and essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire and GQ, among many others.
He recently moved to Los Angeles because he’s a schmuck.

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