Virtual Event: Zak Salih

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series and Grubstreet welcome celebrated writer ZAK SALIH for a discussion of his debut novel, Let's Get Back to the Party. He will be joined in conversation by acclaimed novelist NICK WHITE, author of How to Survive a Summer and Sweet and Low: Stories. 

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While payment is not required, we are suggesting a $3 contribution to support this author series, our staff, and the future of Harvard Book Store—a locally owned, independently run Cambridge institution. In addition, by purchasing a copy of Let's Get Back to the Party on harvard.com, you support indie bookselling and the writing community during this difficult time.

About Let's Get Back to the Party

It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame.

When he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in more than a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history, nor in the sense of belonging Sebastian craves. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties, friends coupling off and having babies. For Oscar, conformity isn’t peace, it’s surrender.

While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Sebastian with one of his students, Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must reckon not just with one another but with themselves.

Provocative, moving, and rich with sharply drawn characters, Let’s Get Back to the Party introduces an exciting and contemporary new talent.

Praise for Let's Get Back to the Party

"Let's Get Back to the Party is a gorgeous, raw, tender, trenchant novel about men figuring out how to live. At once gimlet-eyed and generous to his wonderfully drawn characters—fallible, lovable, and endlessly real—Salih paints a vivid portrait of the paradoxes of queer life in contemporary America, his characters navigating love and friendship in communities shaped both by freedom and fear, and by trauma that is both collective and individual. This is a stellar debut from a huge talent." —Lydia Kiesling, author of The Golden State

"With an artist's eye for beauty and an art historian's for detail, Zak Salih excavates the lives of his characters and leaves no stone unturned to ask questions about what it means to be a queer individual, to be a queer community, to be queer alone and with others. Let's Get Back to the Party is a book for those of us who simultaneously adore and abhor the pains and ecstasies of social closeness—which is to say it's a book for us now, us all." —Matt Ortile, author of The Groom Will Keep His Name

"Let’s Get Back to the Party is a generous, incisive, richly drawn novel about our universal quest for connection across difference. Through brilliantly braided perspectives and a will-they/won’t-they/should-they love story that will keep you turning the pages, Salih’s strong debut captures the drama and wonder of our contemporary moment in a voice leavened with humor and heart." —John Glynn, author of Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer