An Evening With Ann Patchett And R. Eric Thomas
The Ivy Bookshop is over the moon to be hosting Ann Patchett and R. Eric Thomas for an evening of conversation about their latest books! We’re grateful to partner with Church of the Redeemer for the use of their spacious sanctuary space. We love the friendship between these two beloved authors, and can’t wait to witness it live onstage on December 11 at 6 PM at Church of the Redeemer!
If you’re new to Ann Patchett’s work, her latest novel Tom Lake has become an instant favorite. It’s a meditation on youthful love, married love and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
And there’s no one like R. Eric Thomas in writing about how to move through the harder parts of life with humor, grace and graciousness. In Congratulations, The Best Is Over!, Thomas moves back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore (a place he never wanted to return, even to be buried) and behaves completely out of character. Thomas provides the nitty, and sometimes the gritty, details of wrestling with the life he thought he’d left behind while trying to establish a new one.
Ann Patchett is the author of several novels, works of nonfiction and children’s books. She has been the recipient of numerous awards including the National Humanities Medal, PEN/Faulkner, the Women’s Prize in the U.K., and the Book Sense Book of the Year. Her novel The Dutch House was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. TIME magazine named her one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where she is the owner of Parnassus Books.
R. Eric Thomas is the bestselling author of Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and the YA novel Kings of B’more, a Stonewall Honor book. Both books were also featured as Read with Jenna book-club picks on Today. His latest essay collection is Congratulations, The Best Is Over!. He is a television writer (Apple TV+’s Dickinson, FX’s Better Things), a Lambda Literary Award-winning playwright, and the long-running host of The Moth in Philadelphia. For four years, he was a senior staff writer at ELLE online, where he wrote the popular “Eric Reads the News” column.
