Tom Perrotta in Person

Join us on Tuesday, June 2 at 7 PM as Tom Perrotta talks about his new novel, Ghost Town. He will be joined in conversation by Martín Espada.

From New York Times bestselling author Tom Perrotta, hailed by critics as “the Steinbeck of Suburbia” (Time), “our Balzac of the burbs” (Chicago Sun-Times), and “an American Chekhov” (The New York Times), comes a gripping and darkly nostalgic tale about a tumultuous summer in 1970s suburban New Jersey, from the perspective of a middle-aged writer looking back on a series of events that changed his life—and the story he finally has the courage to tell.
Jimmy Perrini lives in 1970s suburban New Jersey, a few miles from Manhattan, but a world apart. At the end of eighth grade, after tragedy strikes, Jimmy finds himself lost in a fog of grief that alienates him from friends and family, drifting instead into troubling friendships with two older teenagers: one a notorious local burnout with a fast car, an endless supply of W**d, and a shaky grasp of reality; the other a smart, eccentric girl, whom Jimmy finds himself drawn to as they become entranced by her Ouija board, which may just offer the only salve to their grief.
As a fateful public drama unfolds, Jimmy is torn between the occult beyond and the cold realities of the place he has called home. Narrated by a much older Jimmy, a literary-turned-commercial novelist, Ghost Town reveals how the past haunts the present—the way our ghosts are always with us, even when we think we’ve left them behind.

Tom Perrotta is the author of eleven works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers and Mrs. Fletcher, which were adapted into acclaimed HBO series. His new novel is Ghost Town.

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems is called Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025). His previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2021. Other
poetry collections include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003) and Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (2019). Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a
Guggenheim Fellowship. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies
Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer with Su Clínica Legal in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

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