Virtual Event: Atticus Lish

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes acclaimed novelist ATTICUS LISH—author of the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning Preparation for the Next Life—for a discussion of his latest novel, The War for Gloria. He will be joined in conversation by award-winning journalist and academic DUNCAN WHITE, author of Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War.

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About The War for Gloria

Corey Goltz grows up in the working-class outskirts of Boston as the only child of Gloria, whose ambitions were derailed early but who has always given her son everything she can. Corey, restless, dreams of leaving home for a great adventure.

Instead, when he is fifteen, the world comes crashing down upon him, when Gloria is diagnosed with ALS and, too late, his estranged father, Leonard—a man of great charisma but dubious moral character—reenters the picture. Determined to be his mother’s hero at any cost, Corey begins shouldering responsibility for her expensive medical care, pushing himself to his physical and emotional limits as her disease cruelly progresses. And as Leonard’s influence over Corey grows, Corey must dismantle the myth of his father’s genius and confront the evil that lurks beneath it.

Gritty, visceral, and profoundly stirring, The War for Gloria tells the story of a young man, straddling childhood and adulthood, whose yearning to protect his mother requires him to risk destroying his father. An indelible work from a strikingly original voice in American fiction.

Praise for The War for Gloria

“Unflinching and heartbreaking . . . Lish imbues the male characters’ varied pitches of toxic masculinity with great sadness, smoothing the edges off their macho posturing, and he writes with devastating empathy of Gloria’s highs and lows. This is a tremendous achievement.” —Publishers Weekly [starred review]