In-Store: Hallie Elizabeth Newton: Agnes Lives! w/ David Lipsky

Event guidelines:

• Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
• Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
• A signing will follow the talk.
• Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
• The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/eW0GvgQlSo0
• As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

A day-in-the-life debut novel about a fading socialite on the hunt for someone to K*ll her before her next SoulCycle class.

New York City, 2014. Agnes Maurer seeks a willing murderer and wonders what she should wear. Candidates include: an icy magazine editor with a special cutlery set; an eccentric designer from her past; and Agnes’s cruel novelist boyfriend. As she Ubers from Upper East Side shopping to Craigslist gun deals, Agnes’ desperation becomes an exhibition, a swan song of millennial sexuality as internalized abuse and consummate style, with the knob righty-tightened all the way.

Newton's prose is disturbingly fun, relentless, shattering. A crafted study of existential despair that culminates in a worthy, intense denouement.

Hallie Elizabeth Newton was born in Mississippi. She received her first screenplay credit for At Any Price, released by Sony Picture Classics. In 2016, she received the Goldwater Fellowship to earn her master’s in creative writing from NYU. Her short story “Man Made” won first prize for fiction in Columbia Journal’s 2020 Winter Contest. Her work is forthcoming from American Chordata. She lives between New York and the Deep South.

David Lipsky is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's magazine, The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Magazine Writing, McSweeney's, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and many others. He contributed as an essayist to NPR's All Things Considered, and is the recipient of a Media Award from GLAAD as well as the National Magazine Award. He is the author of the acclaimed novel The Art Fair, a collection of stories, Three Thousand Dollars, which received a Henfield Award; his nonfiction book Absolutely American was a New York Times best-seller and Time magazine Best Book of the Year; Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace was also a New York Times bestseller, an NPR Best Book of the Year. His most recent book, 2023's The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial, was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Amazon, Publishers Weekly, among others. His memoir Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is the basis for the acclaimed film The End of the Tour.

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