Name: In-Store: Casey Scieszka: The Fountain w/ Isaac Fitzgerald
Start: 2026-03-17T19:00:00-04:00
End: 2026-03-17T20:00:00-04:00
Location: Books Are Magic Montague

$In-Store: Casey Scieszka: The Fountain w\/ Isaac Fitzgerald$

“A provocative novel that incisively explores the question of what makes a meaningful life.” —Kirkus Reviews
About this Event

Event guidelines:

Each ticket will include either a copy of the featured book or a $10 Books Are Magic gift card.
Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
A signing will follow the talk.
Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
The event will also be livestreamed for free here: https://youtube.com/live/yjfMKQBDAzY
As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.

If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].

A propulsive and deeply moving novel about eternity and mortality that asks what it would mean to live forever.

Vera Van Valkenburgh hasn’t been home in one hundred and eighty-eight years. But now Vera, forever twenty-six and able to heal from any wound, has returned to the Catskills. Whatever made her family immortal happened here, and if she can uncover it, maybe she can reverse it. After nearly two centuries—an endless sequence of unnoticed, meaningless lives and a soul-shaking incident in the desert—she longs to be released.

Posing as a newly arrived forest ranger, she quickly blends into the upstate community and learns of something curious and disturbing. A mysterious, well-funded company is snapping up local property, no matter how high the asking price. But when her brother, a fellow immortal shows up, accompanied by a woman whose face is incredibly familiar to Vera, the purpose for her return gets clouded and Vera is in a race against time to find out what has caused her condition before someone else does.

Blending the spectacular with the everyday in a tale filled with humor and warmth, The Fountain explores what gives life meaning and how our understandings of our histories shape—and cage—us.

Casey Scieszka is a born and raised Brooklynite who has lived in Beijing, San Francisco, Fez, and Timbuktu where she was a Fulbright Scholar. In 2013 she and her husband, artist Steven Weinberg, moved to the Catskill Mountains and opened the Spruceton Inn: a Catskills Bed & Bar, which runs an annual Artist Residency hosting world-renowned painters, bestselling authors, and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists.

Isaac Fitzgerald is the New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts. He is also the author of the bestselling children’s book How to Be a Pirate as well as the co-author of Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them and Knives & Ink: Chefs and the Stories Behind Their Tattoos (winner of an IACP Award). He appears frequently on The Today Show, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, GQ, The Guardian, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and numerous other publications. He lives with his wife on the North Fork of Long Island. His next book, American Rambler, is forthcoming from Knopf this May.