HERNAN DIAZ: "Ply" (w/ Adriana E. Ramírez)
About this Event
White Whale Bookstore and the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh are honored to present an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz in conversation with Adriana E. Ramírez, to celebrate Hernan Diaz's new book, Ply: A Novel.
This in-person, ticketed event will take place at the Carnegie Library Lecture Hall in Pittsburgh on October 14th. Doors will open at 6:15 p.m.
There are options for floor seats and upper level seats. Each ticket includes one general admission seat on the designated level, and one signed copy of Ply.
Note: All books will be pre-signed. There will be no signing line for personalizations, books from home, or photos following this event.
ABOUT THE BOOK
“Ply is majestic. A cracked mirror world, a lot like ours; peopled by survivors, a lot like us; sentences so fine they break the skin; a plot that swerves through loss, love, trust, betrayal, art, science, society and control.” —David Mitchell
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Trust turns to the future with a novel that examines the place of technology in the American imagination
Centuries from now, at the dawn of a historical epoch filled with both uncertainty and promise, an orphan is adrift in a city on the brink of a great transformation. The state has been dismantled, and humans are reinventing social bonds and learning new ways to coexist with nature. Following a childhood defined by loss, survival, and found family, the orphan grows up to become a “pincher,” someone who steals electricity from the grid to sell it on the black market. It’s a high-risk life, one that brings her into a rich art and music scene where she powers underground concerts. It also leads her to a colossal scientific invention that could change the very fabric of reality.
After rewriting America’s past with his two previous novels, Hernan Diaz defies expectations with his third and gives us a breathtaking glimpse into the future. A major achievement from a major contemporary writer, Ply questions the place of technology in the American experiment with a plot that grabs both heart and mind. It is a novel of ideas built from a story of people. Combining Dickensian odyssey, family drama, and scientific thriller, Ply poignantly charts the tenuous boundaries of selfhood and the distance that inevitably stands between us and those we love.
HERNAN DIAZ is the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Trust, one of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the Century. His previous novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages.
ADRIANA E. RAMÍREZ is a writer, critic, and poet based in Pittsburgh. She is the author of The Violence: My Family’s Colombian War (Scribner, 2026), the 2015 PEN/Fusion Emerging Writer’s Prize-winning Dead Boys (Little A, 2016), and The Swallows: Poems (Blue Sketch Press, 2016). Ramírez is also a former critic-at-large for the Los Angeles Times’s Book Section and the former columnist and books editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is the cofounder of Aster(ix) Journal with Angie Cruz. Her writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, People Magazine, and elsewhere. She once lost terribly on Jeopardy!.
Agenda
🕑: 06:00 PM - 07:00 PM
Doors open
🕑: 07:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Event begins
🕑: 08:00 PM - 08:30 AM
Signing
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 38.50 to USD 44.21
