Virtual Event: Joshua Ferris

Harvard Book Store, Politics and Prose, and Books & Books welcome award-winning novelist JOSHUA FERRIS for a discussion of his latest, highly anticipated novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes. He will be joined in conversation by LYNNE TILLMAN, the acclaimed author of Men and Apparitions and The Complete Madame Realism and Other Stories. 

Ticketing

There are two ticket options available for this event.

Admission Ticket- $33.25: Includes one admission link and one copy of A Calling for Charlie Barnes. U.S. shipping also included. Books will be shipped to ticket-holders following the event. Please note: we are unable to ship internationally.

Free RSVP (limited availability): Includes one admission link. These tickets are limited in quantity.

About A Calling for Charlie Barnes

Someone is telling the story of the life of Charlie Barnes, and it doesn't appear to be going well. Too often divorced, discontent with life's compromises and in a house he hates, this lifelong schemer and eternal romantic would like out of his present circumstances and into the American dream. But when the twin calamities of the Great Recession and a cancer scare come along to compound his troubles, his dreams dwindle further, and an infinite past full of forking paths quickly tapers to a black dot.

Then, against all odds, something goes right for a change: Charlie is granted a second act. With help from his storyteller son, he surveys the facts of his life and finds his true calling where he least expects it—in a sacrifice that redounds with selflessness and love—at last becoming the man his son always knew he could be.

A Calling for Charlie Barnes is a profound and tender portrait of a man whose desperate need to be loved is his downfall, and a brutally funny account of how that love is ultimately earned.

Praise for A Calling for Charlie Barnes

"Joshua Ferris is one of our best writers, and A Calling for Charlie Barnes is wonderful: fast and deep, urgent and brilliant. Ingeniously written, it had me up reading late into the night. A hilarious, intimate, and scathing takedown of so many American vanities." —Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

“Dazzling. Mind-blowing. About as much fun as you can have without risking arrest.” —Richard Russo, author of Empire Falls and Chances Are…

"If Augie March was a “Columbus of the near-at-hand,” Charlie Barnes is a whole America: a dreaming, scheming paterfamilias forever “expanding out to the coasts” and outstripping whatever inconvenient facts or exuberant fictions might hope to contain him. Is he for real? Are any of us? This much is certain: Funny, moving, and formally a work of genius, A Calling for Charlie Barnes is quite literally the book Joshua Ferris was born to write." —Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire