The Center for Fiction Presents Garrard Conley on All the World Beside with Marlon James

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT April 9, 2024

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

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New York Times bestselling author Garrard Conley joins The Center for Fiction to celebrate his first novel All the World Beside. Known for his electrifying memoir Boy Erased, Conley’s latest work is a deeply moving queer love story set in Puritan New England. All the World Beside follows the characters of Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and physician Arthur Lyman, two men who fall in love with each other despite the confines of their dogmatic Christian community. Nathaniel and Arthur’s love entangles their families in a complicated web of secrets as the two imagine an impossible future for themselves. With this page-turning intimate novel, Conley “gives us historical fiction at its most delicious and absorbing” (Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox). Joining Conley is esteemed Jamaican writer Marlon James, author of such novels as Black Leopard, Red Wolf and A Brief History of Seven Killings. Conley and James will have a vibrant conversation on the novel and its themes of queer love and zealotry, a tension both authors have explored in their work to great acclaim. After the conversation, Conley will sign books.

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In Conversation

  • Conley author photo (c) Brandon Taylor Large

    Garrard Conley

    Garrard Conley

    Garrard Conley is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Boy Erased as well as the creator and co-producer of the podcast UnErased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America. His work has been published by the New York Times, Oxford American, Time, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. Conley is a graduate of Brooklyn College’s MFA program, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow specializing in fiction. He is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Kennesaw State University.


    Photo Credit: Brandon Taylor

  • Marlon James.credit.Mark.Seliger Large

    Marlon James

    Marlon James

    Marlon James is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, as well as the novels The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil. A professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, he lives in New York City.


    Photo Credit: Mark Seliger

Featured Book

  1. . 
    ALL THE WORLD BESIDE cover art Large

    All the World Beside

    By Garrard Conley

    Published by Penguin Publishing Group

    PURCHASE

    Cana, Massachusetts: a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language.

    As the bond between these two men grows more and more passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments which threaten to destroy them in this world and the next. And when the religious ecstasies of the Great Awakening begin to take hold, igniting a new era of zealotry, Nathaniel and Arthur search for a path out of an impossible situation, imagining a future for themselves which has no name. Their wives and children must do the same, looking beyond the known world for a new kind of wilderness, both physical and spiritual.

    Set during the turbulent historical upheavals which shaped America’s destiny and following in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, All the World Beside reveals the very human lives just beneath the surface of dogmatic belief. Bestselling author Garrard Conley has created a page-turning, vividly imagined historical tale that is both a love story and a crucible.

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