About this Event
Join us on Monday, July 13 at 7 PM as Daniel Mason presents his new novel, Country People. He will be in conversation wth Joe Donahue.
About the Book
A year in the life of a family as they strike out into the unknown (aka Vermont), leaving all the comforts of home behind—a rollicking, lyrical novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason, the bestselling author of North Woods and one of America’s greatest living writers
Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he’s become a disappointment to his family. So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life.
But Miles is a man of many enthusiasms, one who possesses, in Kate’s words, a great capacity “to fall in with anyone, anywhere.” And no sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world’s delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas.
The new friends, the enchanted woods, the histories: sure, no PhD, but all good fun. Until Miles stumbles upon a bizarre—perhaps ridiculous—local legend, which, he soon suspects, might not be just a legend after all.
Joyous, absurd, and life-affirming, Country People is a luminous exploration of marriage and parenthood, the nature of belief and the power of stories, and the ways in which we find connection in an increasingly fragmented world.
About the Author
Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner, The Winter Soldier, A Registry of My Passage upon the Earth—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—and North Woods, a New York Times and Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2023 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into twenty-eight languages, adapted for opera and the stage, and awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is an associate professor in the Stanford University department of psychiatry.
About Joe Donahue
Joe Donahue is a nationally acclaimed host and interviewer. Historian David McCullough said “there is simply no better interviewer in the business.” His guest list is long and impressive. He has been awarded a slew of national and regional awards for his interviews and journalism. He can be heard on the syndicated “Book Show” and weekday mornings from 9-Noon as the host of The Roundtable on WAMC/Northeast Public Radio.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
First Congregational Church at the Center, 1 Church Street, South Hadley, United States
USD 0.00
