Amy Shearn launches "Dear Edna Sloane," in conversation with Carley Moore

Local author Amy Shearn will be joined by writer Carley Moore for a reading, reception, conversation, and book signing.

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Edna Sloane was a promising author at the top of her game. Her debut novel was an instant classic and commercial success, vaulting her into the heady echelons of the 1980s New York City lit scene. Then she disappeared and was largely forgotten. Decades later, Seth Edwards is an aspiring writer and editor who feels he’s done all the right things to achieve literary success, but despairs that his dream will be forever out of reach. He becomes obsessed with the idea that if he can rediscover Sloane, it will make his career. His search for her leads to unexpected places and connections, and the epistolary correspondence that ensues makes up this book, a novel infused with insights and meditations about what our cultural obsession with the “next big thing” does to literature, and what it means to be a creative person in the world.

“I’ve long been an ardent, near-obsessive fan of Amy Shearn’s sophisticated, hilarious, big-hearted fiction, and with Dear Edna Sloane, she once again knocks it out of the park. This charming, compulsively readable novel—which I read in one sitting, laughing out loud every few minutes—brilliantly satirizes the literary world in a manner that reminded me, somehow, of both Laurie Colwin and Candace Bushnell, Curtis Sittenfeld and, more than any other writer, Taffy Brodesser-Akner. But what fuels this tour de force—aside from Shearn’s pitch-perfect tone and precise, urgent sentences—are her complex, lovable characters and their emotionally resonant thoughts and ideas. I wanted to live inside this book forever.” —Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

“Oh to be inside Amy Shearn’s head to figure out how she wrote such a wise, witty, and brilliantly knowing novel about the literary life and how authors connect to readers—and to themselves. Seth, a hungry young writer, sets out to find a once-famous and now-vanished novelist, Edna Sloane, sure his discovery will set him up in the literary stratosphere. And here is where things get outrageously creative, because much of his search is told through correspondence, and the deeper his search for Edna, the more his truest—and sometimes uncomfortable—self emerges. Delightful, insightful, and so, so wonderfully meaningful to anyone who truly cares about the arts. I just loved this.” —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, Cruel Beautiful World, and With or Without You

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here, as well as two forthcoming novels. She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, The Resort LIC, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Amy's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. Amy has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children. You can find her at amyshearnwrites.com or @amyshearn.

Carley Moore is the author of Panpocalypse, The Not Wives, 16 Pills, and The Stalker Chronicles. Carley’s debut poetry collection Heartless is forthcoming from Indolent Books. She’s a Clinical Professor of Writing and Creative Production at New York University and an Associate at The Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. Carley lives in Brooklyn with her kid and two cats. Follow her on Instagram @fragmentedsky or find her blogging on Substack.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Lofty Pigeon Books, Church Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, USA, United States