Join us for an evening with Chad Harbach, who will read from his new novel, The Brightness. A conversation with Rebecca Taylor will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: From the bestselling author of literary sensation The Art of Fielding comes an urgent, deeply felt story of friendship, art, love, and grief, following two young women on the brink of irrevocable change.
Parties and weddings, messy hookups and marred friendships, art and love and grief—The Brightness follows the electric, chaotic, everything-can-happen lives of Pella and her best friend, Irma, as they fumble their way out of sleepy, Midwestern Westish College and into a larger world that will upend their connection and everything they thought they understood about their own place within it.
At twenty-seven, Pella’s life looks settled: she’s a recent college grad, engaged to Mike, her longtime boyfriend, and helping her friend Owen pull off his own destination wedding on Block Island. But over that wild wedding weekend, Pella’s past and present collide spectacularly, blowing up her plans and sending her spiraling toward an unplanned future in New York City. Meanwhile, back at Westish College, twenty-one-year-old Irma’s involvement with a politically charged prank—one that has roiled both the campus and the world beyond—threatens to derail her brilliant future. As Irma and Pella cycle through possibilities and identities, both navigate the heights and depths of passion and ambition, and the incalculable wages of love and loss.
In stunning scenes and spectacular characters—each drawn with an almost superhuman vividness and humanity—Chad Harbach captures that specific, shimmering anxiety of your twenties when life still feels wide open, even as hard and irreversible choices start closing in. Energetic, funny, and deeply human, this much-anticipated follow-up to The Art of Fielding confirms Chad Harbach as one of the most accomplished and deep-seeing writers of our time.
About the Author: Chad Harbach is the author of the bestselling novel The Art of Fielding, which has been translated into more than twenty languages, and a founder of n+1. He was raised in Racine, Wisconsin, and educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He lives in Northern California with his son, Ansel, and their dog, Curtis.
About the Moderator: Rebecca Taylor is a writer and psychotherapist entering practice as a supervisee in social work. She coproduced the Charlottesville Reading Series from 2016 to 2019, celebrating the work of over eighty writers and authors, and served as a past moderator for the Virginia Festival of the Book. In years prior, while earning her BA and MFA, Rebecca taught creative writing in community settings and at Columbia University, and her essays, poems, and stories appeared in print here and there, notably in The Believer and the essay anthology Read Harder (2014) from McSweeney’s Books.
