Love, Loyalty and Family
Family can inspire love, frustration, sacrifice and even madness. In this session, bestselling authors Catherine Newman and Gary Shteyngart will explore the lengths we will go to protect, support, or redeem the people closest to us. (Unfortunately, Jess Walter will not take part in this session as originally planned.)
| Fast Passes: | This event has free Fast Passes. Fast Passes are not available yet. |
| Where: | Student Union North Ballroom (Seats 670)  |
| When: | Sat, Mar 14, 2:30 pm - 3:25 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing South Ballroom (following presentation)
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| Genre: | Fiction / Literature |
| Moderator: | Pamela Treadwell-Rubin |
| Sponsor: | Session made possible courtesy of TMC Health |
Panelists
Catherine NewmanCatherine Newman is The New York Times bestselling author of the memoirs "Catastrophic Happiness" and "Waiting for Birdy," the middle grade novel "One Mixed-Up Night," the kids’ craft book "Stitch Camp," the bestselling how-to books for kids "How to Be a Person" and "What Can I Say?," and the novels "We All Want Impossible Things," "Sandwich," and "Wreck....
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Gary ShteyngartGary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. His debut novel, "The Russian Debutante's Handbook," won the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction....
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Books:
Wreck
A Novel
Catherine Newman
Fiction / Literature
HarperCollins Publishers
October 2025
ISBN 9780063453913
Hardcover, 224 pages
The acclaimed bestselling author of "Sandwich" is back with a wonderful novel, full of laughter and heart, about marriage, family, and what happens when life doesn’t go as planned.
If you loved Rocky and her family on vacation on Cape Cod, wait until you join them at home two years later. (And if this is your first meeting with this crew, get ready to laugh and cry—and relate.)
Rocky, still anxious, nostalgic, and funny, is living in Western Massachusetts with her husband Nick and their daughter Willa, who's back home after college. Their son, Jamie, has taken a new job in New York, and Mort, Rocky’s widowed father, has moved in.
It all couldn’t be more ridiculously normal...until Rocky finds herself obsessed with a local accident that only tangentially affects them—and with a medical condition that, she hopes, won’t affect them at all.
With her signature wit and wisdom, Catherine Newman explores the hidden rules of family, the heavy weight of uncertainty, and the gnarly fact that people—no matter how much you love them—are not always exactly who you want them to be. More/less
Vera, or Faith
A Novel
Gary Shteyngart
Fiction / Literature
Random House
July 2025
ISBN 9780593595091
Hardcover, 256 pages
The Bradford-Shmulkin family is falling apart. A very modern blend of Russian, Jewish, Korean, and New England WASP, they love one another deeply but the pressures of life in an unstable America are fraying their bonds.
There's Daddy, a struggling, cash-thirsty editor whose Russian heritage gives him a surprising new currency in the upside-down world of twenty-first-century geopolitics; his wife, Anne Mom, a progressive, underfunded blue blood from Boston who's barely holding the household together; their son, Dylan, whose blond hair and Mayflower lineage provide him pride of place in the newly forming American political order; and, above all, the young Vera, half Jewish, half Korean, and wholly original.
Observant, sensitive, and always writing down new vocabulary words, Vera wants only three things in life: to make a friend at school, to keep Daddy and Anne Mom together, and to meet her birth mother, Mom Mom, who will at last tell Vera the secret of who she really is and how to ensure love's survival in this great, mad, imploding world.
Both biting and deeply moving, "Vera, or Faith" is a boldly imagined story of family and country told through the clear and tender eyes of a child. With a nod to "What Maisie Knew," Henry James's classic story of parents, children, and the dark ironies of a rapidly transforming society, "Vera, or Faith" demonstrates why Gary Shteyngart is, in the words of The New York Times, "one of his generation's most original and exhilarating writers." More/less
