The Art of the Short Story: Benjamin Nugent on Fraternity with Leslie Jamison

Free

Online Event

Wednesday, 7:30 pm EDT July 8, 2020

Donate $10 to Help Support Our Events

Award-winning writer Benjamin Nugent will discuss his latest release Fraternity: Stories with Leslie Jamison (Make It Scream, Make It Burn). The short story collection “weaves humor and drama to shine an unflinching light on the young adults convening behind the fraternity wall” (Publishers Weekly).

“In these dark, witty, and sharply written stories, Benjamin Nugent takes an unflinching look at that strange tradition, the all-male fraternity, which, in his gifted hands, begins to look like a very strange and insidious social experiment.” —Zadie Smith

In Conversation

Benjamin Nugent

Benjamin Nugent

Benjamin Nugent is the winner of the Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review. He has written for n+1, the New York Times magazine, Time, and other publications. He is the author of the novel Good Kids and the nonfiction book American Nerd.
Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison is the author of three nonfiction books–The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, and most recently, the essay collection Make it Scream, Make it Burn—as well as a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.

Featured Books

.

Fraternity: Stories

By Benjamin Nugent

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PURCHASE

In a Massachusetts college town stands a dilapidated colonial: Delta Zeta Chi. Here, we meet Newton, the beloved chapter president; Oprah, the sensitive reader; Petey, the treasurer, loyal to a fault; Claire, the couch-surfing dropout who hopes to sell them drugs; and a girl known, for unexpected reasons, as God. Though the living room reeks of sweat and spilled beer, the brothers know that to be inside is everything.

Fraternity celebrates the debauched kinship of boys and girls straddling adolescence and adulthood: the drunken antics, solemn confessions, and romantic encounters that mark their first years away from home. Beneath each episode lies the dread of exclusion. The closeted Oprah’s hero worship gives way to real longing. A combat veteran offers advice on hazing. An alienated young woman searches for a sanctuary. And the shadow of assault hovers over every sexual encounter.
.

Make It Scream, Make It Burn

By Leslie Jamison

Published by Little, Brown and Company

PURCHASE

With the virtuosic synthesis of memoir, criticism, and journalism for which Leslie Jamison has been so widely acclaimed, the fourteen essays in Make It Scream, Make It Burn explore the oceanic depths of longing and the reverberations of obsession.

Among Jamison’s subjects are 52 Blue, deemed “the loneliest whale in the world”; the eerie past-life memories of children; the devoted citizens of an online world called Second Life; the haunted landscape of the Sri Lankan Civil War; and an entire museum dedicated to the relics of broken relationships. Jamison follows these examinations to more personal reckonings — with elusive men and ruptured romances, with marriage and maternity — in essays about eloping in Las Vegas, becoming a stepmother, and giving birth.

Often compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, and widely considered one of the defining voices of her generation, Jamison interrogates her own life with the same nuance and rigor she brings to her subjects. The result is a provocative reminder of the joy and sustenance that can be found in the unlikeliest of circumstance.

.