The Writer’s Center presents a FREE virtual chat about the craft of fiction! We’re joined by author Susan Coll for a discussion of her new novel, The Literati. Susan is in conversation with Amy Freeman, author and Development Director at The Writer’s Center.
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Susan Coll is the author of seven novels, including Bookish People and Real Life and Other Fictions, a Washington Post 2024 Notable Work of Fiction and USA TODAY bestseller. Her third novel, Acceptance, was made into a television movie starring the hilarious Joan Cusack. Susan’s work has appeared in publications including the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, Washingtonian magazine, Moment Magazine, NPR.org, and Atlantic.com. She is the events advisor at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, and was the president of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation for five years. Visit Susan online at susancoll.com; Instagram: @susan_keselenko_coll
About the Book
Aspirant, bookish, and close to broke, 26-year-old Clemi steps into her dream job at a prestigious literary nonprofit and finds herself in the bull’s eye of a financial, legal, and existential calamity. The executive director has disappeared, leaving behind an inscrutable cat to which she is highly allergic. Meanwhile, the bank accounts have been overdrawn, the FBI is asking questions, and she has three days to pull off the annual fundraising gala, a glamorous affair filled with famous writers and local literati.
On the upside, she will get to meet her all-time favorite writer, who has won the award. Clemi has read and reread her novels, pouring over her every word. But her interactions with the author and her eight-year-old son, as well as with the nonprofit’s Board Members, leave her wondering whether certain writers are better on the page than in person.
All the while, Clemi is trying to sort out her own life: her current boyfriend is, like every boyfriend before him, a pompous poseur, and the clock is running on her apartment-sitting gig. She finds herself wondering what all the goings-on in this dysfunctional, scandal-plagued nonprofit have to do with literature. And if it’s time to let go of her literary aspirations and apply to law school.
In the week in which this madcap story unfolds, USA TODAY bestselling author Susan Coll weaves together a charmingly witty and warm comedy of manners that offers a peek behind the literary curtain–one that anyone who’s ever been a little bit uncertain of what the future might hold can relate to.
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