The Auburn Conference
by Tom Piazza
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"It is 1883 and America is at a crossroads. The Civil War is nearly twenty years in the past, Reconstruction has been crushed in the South, and the Gilded Age is bringing unprecedented prosperity to some, along with radical social and class conflicts. At a tiny college in upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy show more Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers' Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. Over the course of a weekend this already combustible mix is heated up by a group of Suffragists advocating for women's rights, a contingent of die-hard Confederate sympathizers, an apocalyptic street-corner preacher, and a muckraking journalist who stirs the pot in hopes of bringing things to a boil. In this wildly audacious fictional tour de force, author Tom Piazza brings these figures to life as they encounter one another onstage and off - arguing, telling stories, reading aloud, and finally engaging in a debate that leads the gathering to the edge of chaos. By turns brilliantly comic and eerily prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883 - the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal"-- show lessTags
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Marvelous! A wonderful book. Piazza has written his illustrious characters with much affection and humour. In a short novel, he skillfully presents the complexity of America in the 1880s and, nudge nudge, now.
A young newspaper writer gets the idea to have a conference in Auburn New York and invite some of the day's luminaries. It's 1883, so the luminaries are quite luminous: Mark Twain, Frederik Douglass, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, etc. The conference doesn't turn out quite like he planned, and he seems disappointed, but the dialogs are fascinating and prove enlightening about different facets of America at the time, and of course since it's written now, about today as well. A very enjoyable read.
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2024 Tournament of Books
18 works; 9 members
Author Information
13+ Works 910 Members
Tom Piazza is the author of The Guide to Classic Recorded Jazz, for which he won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award. His writing about American music has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, The Atlantic Monthly, The Oxford American, and elsewhere. A noted fiction writer as well, Piazza won a James Michener Award for his show more short-story collection, Blues And Trouble. He lives in New Orleans and is at work on a novel. show less
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- Members
- 30
- Popularity
- 929,629
- Reviews
- 2
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- (4.00)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
- ASINs
- 1
