Writers at the Wrecking Bar Presents Adam Ross in conversation with Sanjena Sathian – Playworld
Wednesday, Feb 05, 2025 7:00 PM
Location:
The Marianna Room at the Wrecking Bar Brewpub
292 Moreland Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30307
A big and big-hearted novel—one enthralling, transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan, from the critically acclaimed author of “Mr. Peanut” (“A brilliant, powerful, and memorable book” —The New York Times).
At the February edition of Writers at the Wrecking Bar, A Cappella Books welcomes author Adam Ross to celebrate the release of his latest book, “Playworld.” Adam Ross will appear in conversation with Atlanta’s own Sanjena Sathian, author of the critically acclaimed novel “Gold Diggers."
Presented in partnership with Stuckey’s.
About the Book
“In the fall of 1980, when I was fourteen, a friend of my parents named Naomi Shah fell in love with me. She was thirty-six, a mother of two, and married to a wealthy man. Like so many things that happened to me that year, it didn’t seem strange at the time.”
Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show “The Nuclear Family” and the pressure of high school at New York’s elite Boyd Prep—along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach—he’s teetering on the edge of collapse.
Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin’s senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink—whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren—Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi’s Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm.
Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, “Playworld” is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era—with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age’s excesses—and who seem to care little about what their children are up to—Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life.
About the Author
Adam Ross is the author of “Mr. Peanut,” which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters.
About the Conversation Partner
Sanjena Sathian is the author of the critically acclaimed novel “Gold Diggers,” which was named a Top 10 Best Book of 2021 by The Washington Post and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction. Her short fiction appears in "The Best American Short Stories," The Atlantic, Conjunctions, One Story, Boulevard, and more. She’s written nonfiction for The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Drift, The Yale Review, and NewYorker.com, among other outlets. She’s an alumna of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at Emory University, the University of Iowa, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. In spring 2025, she will serve as the Ferrol A. Sams Jr. Distinguished Chair of English at Mercer University. Her second novel, “Goddess Complex” will be released March 11, 2025.
About Writers at the Wrecking Bar
A Cappella Books presents Writers at the Wrecking Bar, a series of live author interview events showcasing some of the country’s freshest voices in literary and contemporary fiction. Each program includes writers in conversation with an arbiter of Atlanta’s book scene, giving the audience a chance to experience and participate in the Q&A and get a signed copy of the book. Held upstairs in the Marianna Room of the Wrecking Bar Brewpub, Writers at the Wrecking Bar hosts a cash bar, starting at 7 PM. The author conversation and book signing follow at 7:30 PM.
