It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in Upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers鈥 Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883鈥攖he chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.
鈥淭丑别 mother of all writers鈥 conferences. Piazza doesn't force anything, and he doesn't miss a trick.鈥濃擱oy Blount Jr.
鈥The Auburn Conference is a brilliant imagining of an 1883 writers鈥 conference with Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, and other luminaries as characters. This august round table in Upstate New York grapples with the fate of American democracy and what constitutes literature. The dialogue imagined by Piazza鈥攅specially his treatment of Harriet Beecher Stowe鈥攊s dazzling. Piazza conjures a distant era that eerily translates to our own broken and troubled times. This is an epic novel by one of America鈥檚 greatest writers.鈥濃擠ouglas Brinkley
鈥淲ho wouldn鈥檛 want to go to this conference?鈥濃擥reil Marcus
鈥淎n unexpected combination of wit, passion, and intellect that lands with tremendous relevance.鈥濃擬ary Gaitskill
鈥淭om Piazza has gathered the nation鈥檚 most renowned writers in response to a provocative question: 鈥榃hat is an American?鈥 These four words posed by a character in the aftermath of the Civil War, resound today with such perfect timing. Through this tantalizing dialogue, the past interrogates the present and future, and we cannot play innocent or uninformed. To read The Auburn Conference is to be there, listening, raising one鈥檚 hand, nodding one鈥檚 head, or even rising to one鈥檚 feet in protest or applause.鈥濃擸usef Komunyakaa
鈥淲hat do Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain discuss over brandy and cigars? What gets Emily Dickinson out of the house? The Auburn Conference is an ebullient work of loving homage, pitch-perfect ventriloquism, and drawing-room farce that unfolds into an examination of grand American questions: What, finally, is America? And does it deserve to be saved?鈥濃擭athaniel Rich
鈥淭丑别 Auburn Conference is a display of intellectual pyrotechnics, a fictional nineteenth-century writers鈥 conference in which modern and historical observations abound on literature, celebrity, and ego, culminating in a grand debate over slavery, women鈥檚 suffrage, and the American ideal. Both witty and intellectually acute, this is a powerful novel.鈥濃擱oxana Robinson
"An 1883 writers' conference raises questions still roiling 21st-century America. . . . [an] intriguing mix of humor and underlying seriousness. . . . Readable and entertaining.鈥濃Kirkus
鈥淟auded novelist and music writer Piazza鈥檚 bravura satire and fluent literary ventriloquism are razor-sharp and hilarious, while the feuds he orchestrates over freedom, the Constitution, race, women鈥檚 rights, democracy, art, and the predominance of lies over truth are all too timely.鈥濃Booklist, starred review
鈥. . . there is much richness and enjoyment to be found in the conversations that Piazza imagines between these great authors as they drink and debate. . . . There is a great deal of thinking going on in The Auburn Conference, yet Piazza still makes all this thinking exciting to read, and he deftly paints the areas of gray in the life of the writer, particularly the nonconformist one."鈥Southern Review of Books
