Adam Wilson and Paul Rome

Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome authors ADAM WILSON and PAUL ROME for a reading and discussion of their respective books, What's Important Is Feeling: Stories and We All Sleep in the Same Room.

In What's Important Is Feeling, bankers prowl Brooklyn bars on the eve of the stock market crash. A debate over Young Elvis versus Vegas Elvis turns existential. Detoxing junkies use a live lobster to spice up their love life. Students on summer break struggle to escape the orbit of a seemingly utopic communal house.

And in the title story, two film school buddies working on a doomed project are left sizing up their own talent, hoping to come out on top—but fearing they won't.

In What's Important Is Feeling, Adam Wilson follows the through-line of contemporary coming-of-age from the ravings of teenage lust to the staggering loneliness of proto-adulthood. He navigates the tough terrain of American life with a delicate balance of comedy and compassion, lyricism and unsparing straightforwardness. Wilson's characters wander through a purgatory of yearning, hope, and grief. No one emerges unscathed.

And in We All Sleep in the Same Room, Paul Rome wrestles with the question: where do you go when you've done everything right? Tom Claughlin, a 40-something labor lawyer, has spent his life fighting an unwinnable war. A husband, recent father, and longtime advocate for the noble New York City workforce, he plunges himself into every case—a school teacher threatened with deportation, a former receptionist haunted by abuse—even as they bring him intimately closer with the firm's newest hire: Jessie, a winsome young legal assistant.

We All Sleep in the Same Room pans between the victories and flirtations of a Times Square office, and the tiffs and tenderness of a Union Square home. A simmering psychological bender, Paul Rome's debut offers a tale of moral erosion and collapse over the course of four fateful months in the fall of 2005.