Chaos, Comedy, Reality
How do we make sense of a world that often seems absurd, fractured, and overwhelming? Lydia Millet and Gary Shteyngart will explore the humor, poignancy, and chaos of contemporary life, using sharp wit and inventive storytelling to illuminate the human experience. (Unfortunately, Jason Mott will be unable to take part in this session as originally planned.)
| Where: | The Commons Room 105 (Seats 217, Wheelchair accessible)  |
| When: | Sun, Mar 15, 2:30 pm - 3:25 pm |
| Signing area: | Sales & Signing Koffler/Commons (following presentation)
|
| Genre: | Fiction / Literature |
| Moderator: | Kenneth Montaney |
| Sponsors: | Session made possible courtesy of Tucson Lifestyle, Visit Tucson, Holly and Steve Shenitzer, Mesch Clark Rothschild |
Panelists
Lydia MilletA National Book Award finalist with "A Children's Bible" in 2020, Lydia Millet is making her ninth appearance at the book festival. Featured will be "Atavists," a collection of stories that was released last spring....
Visit website | 
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....
Visit website | 
Books:
Atavists
Stories
Lydia Millet
Fiction / Literature
W. W. Norton, Incorporated
March 2026
ISBN 9781324123552
240 pages
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
