This event will be held at the Cornwall Town Hall, 24 Pine Street, Cornwall.
On Saturday, August 29, at 5 pm, the Cornwall Library presents a talk with Kurt Andersen, author of The Breakup. In his penetrating and funny new novel, a marriage is cracking apart while a near-future America redraws its borders. Andersen will be in conversation with novelist and biographer Roxana Robinson.
Natalie and Asher’s marriage has long been marked by fault lines, quiet rifts in how they view their fellow Americans and navigate AI-suffused life in 2045, where robots abound. After 23 years together, and after surviving the two years of civil war in the 2030s, Natalie is in rural Tennessee (part of the new Free American Republic) and Asher is in San Francisco (in the now smaller United States). Natalie and Asher’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate.
When Natalie and Asher are brought back into proximity while touring far-flung colleges with their seventeen-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new American landscape, transformed by both the terrorist uprising and technology, all the while dealing with the flux–and resilience–within their own family. They face the questions the nation has reckoned with for a generation: what differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving?
Razor-sharp, ambitious, ranging from tragic to comic and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping story where the personal and sociopolitical intersect in ways bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful. The future portrayed here is not dystopian.
Kurt Andersen is the author of the recent New York Times bestsellers Evil Geniuses and Fantasyland, as well as several bestselling novels, including You Can’t Spell America Without Me, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. With Steven Soderbergh he co-created the dystopian comedy series Command Z. He co-founded Spy magazine and hosted the Peabody Award-winning public radio show and podcast Studio 360. A regular contributor to The New York Times and The Atlantic, he was previously editor-in-chief of New York and a columnist for The New Yorker. He grew up in Nebraska, graduated from Harvard, and lives in New York City and Cornwall, CT with his wife, author and journalist Anne Kreamer.
Books will be available for sale and signing. Registration is required.
