Author Talk (Live & Zoom): “Nobody Gets Out Alive” by Leigh Newman
The Cornwall Library is delighted to present an evening with Leigh Newman, the writer whose new book of eight short stories set in Alaska, Nobody Gets Out Alive, has just been long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction. She is an Alaska native, and even though she now splits her time between Connecticut (“with two dogs, two chickens, a cat and a few feral kids”) and Brooklyn, her writing has a gritty, plausible Last-Frontier humor and sensibility. The frontier in this book does not recall the western movies we’re all too familiar with. It’s the Alaska of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the focus is on spunky, searching females rather than silent, strong males. The earliest story takes place in a 1915 railroad camp, at a time when Anchorage was an unnamed tent city; the latest stories are in Alaska today—global warming, suburbia, opioid addicts, crime.
Wilderness adventures in Nobody Gets Out Alive provide the dramatic setting for more-harrowing personal and interpersonal reckonings that the characters must face. In “High Jinks,” two girls barely in their teens have to take care of themselves on a father-daughter float trip after their fathers fail them in important ways. In “Slide and Glide,” a father who leads his family on an arduous ski trip to an isolated cabin, hoping to restore his marriage, has to struggle to come to terms with his limitations. Of course, the reality of living in Alaska also weighs on the characters in all of the stories. As one says in the story that gives this powerful book its title, “Your average happy person didn’t last in Alaska. It was too much work not to die all the time.”
Though this is Leigh Newman’s debut short story collection, she has an impressive record of literary success. Her memoir Still Points North was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard prize. In non-fiction, she has written articles and essays for The New York Times, Vogue, The Oprah Magazine and other publications. In fiction, her short stories have been in Harper’s, The Paris Review and elsewhere. In 2020 her work was included in The Best American Short Stories and received a Pushcart Prize and the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize (for “humor, wit, and sprezzatura”).
On the off-chance that you don’t know, the word sprezzatura originates in Baldassare Castiglione’s 1528 The Book of the Courtier, which defines it as “a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it.” A good quality for the author of a powerful book of stories about folks in Frontier Alaska.
Leigh Newman will be interviewed by Gillian Blake, who is Senior Vice President, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief at Crown, a division of Penguin Random House. She has edited many bestsellers, including Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction, Rachel Maddow’s Blowout, Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers and Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights.
There is a maximum of 50 participants for the live event. Vaccinations and masks are requested but not required. Registration is required.