Offsite: Hernan Diaz: Ply w/ Jennifer Egan
About this Event
Event guidelines:
- Bundled tickets include a signed copy of the featured book. Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
- Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
- The event will also be livestreamed for free on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/HDhToYWA1qU
- 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].
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.
Jennifer Egan’s most recent novel, The Candy House, a companion to A Visit From the Goon Squad, was one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022 and one of President Obama’s favorite reads of the year. A Visit From the Goon Squad won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was on the list of Best Books of the 21st Century in the New York Times. Egan’s 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and chosen as New York City’s One Book One New York read. Also a journalist, Egan recently spent a year writing about street homelessness and supportive housing for The New Yorker. She has taught literature at the University of Pennsylvania and served as President of PEN America.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 10.89 to USD 41.37
