It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.
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“Lauded novelist and music writer Piazza’s bravura satire and fluent literary ventriloquism are razor-sharp and hilarious, while the feuds he orchestrates over freedom, the Constitution, race, women’s rights, democracy, art, and the predominance of lies over truth are all too timely.”
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Booklist (starred review)