In-Store: Stuart Nadler: Rooms for Vanishing w/ Benjamin Anastas

Event guidelines:

• All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
• Tickets are limited to restrict capacity at our store, and 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/qZnixMLzln8
• 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 prismatic, mind-bending epic about the splintering of a Jewish family from Vienna—exploring the weight of exile and how grief twists our sense of the impossible.
Everyone had been survived into different futures and that I would never see any of them again. I could sense this. I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would not be able to cross over to meet them.
In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.

Sonja, the daughter, has gone in search of her husband who has disappeared into London; Fania, the mother, is confronted with her doppelgänger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend and eventually returns to Prague to make peace with the dead; and Arnold, the father, dares to believe that his long-lost daughter might be alive after he receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be her. Through their stories, we come to see how—amid profound loss and the madness of grief—ghosts are made momentarily real.

Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing explores the boundary between desire and reality; this is a singular work that masterfully considers the possibility of magic, and the dangerous and impossible hope for a different history.

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of two novels, Wise Men and The Inseparables, and a story collection, The Book of Life. His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. He teaches creative writing at Boston College and is a member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in New England.

Benjamin Anastas is the author of three novels and the best-selling memoir Too Good to Be True. His literary journalism, essays, reviews and short fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, Bookforum, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Oxford American, The Best American Essays anthology and numerous other publications in the U.S. and abroad. He lives in Brooklyn and is a member of the literature faculty at Bennington College.

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