Scott Broker w/ Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, THE DISAPPOINTMENT

Indie bookseller and writer Scott Broker discusses his debut novel, The Disappointment, alongside writer Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Set during a doom-fated vacation to the Oregon coast, The Disappointment follows a couple trying to hold close to one another while a bent reality—warped by personal losses and an ever-increasing drift toward the surreal—threatens to unravel them.

Masks are recommended at this event, per request of the authors.

It’s the night before a much-needed vacation, and Jack—a former playwright mourning his failed career—catches his husband, Randy, packing his mother’s urn. They had agreed: no mother on this trip. Parents, living or otherwise, aren’t the ideal guests for romantic getaways. But Randy has been carrying his mother’s remains everywhere since her death, and he isn’t ready to let go now.

Despite its natural beauty and kitschy charm, the Oregon coast does not provide the respite the couple seeks. Instead, their surroundings and encounters with locals grow increasingly surreal as the days pass. An overly -dedicated Method actor, tantra-obsessed neighbors, and a child environmentalist who may be able to communicate with the dead are but a few of the characters whose presence exposes long-simmering tensions that threaten to undo Jack and Randy’s marriage—to say nothing of their hold on reality.

Told with sly, irreverent humor, and shot through with dark currents of envy and longing for something other than what one has, The Disappointment explores the mutual exhilaration and terror of being placed center stage in one’s own life.

Scott Broker is a queer writer, bookseller, and teacher based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in New England Review, Guernica, Fence, Ecotone, and The Idaho Review, among other publications, and he has received fellowships from Tin House and Lambda Literary.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is the Lambda Literary Award-winning author of seven books, and the editor of six anthologies. Sycamore is currently working on a new anthology, ACT UP Beyond New York: Stories and Strategies from a Movement to End the AIDS Crisis. Her new novel, Terry Dactyl, set in Seattle and New York from the emergence of the AIDS crisis to the beginning of the Covid pandemic, was described by the New York Times Book Review as “a remarkably grounded look at what it means to be fully alive.”

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