Author Reading

Cornwall Library Presents

The Cornwall Library will present an evening with author Leigh Newman Saturday, October 8th, at 5 PM. The writer, whose new book of eight short stories set in Alaska, Nobody Gets Out Alive, has just been long-listed for the National Book Award for Fiction.

Newman will be interviewed by Gillian Blake, senior vice president, publisher and editor-in-chief at Crown, a division of Penguin Random House.

Newman is an Alaska native, even though she now splits her time between Connecticut--“with two dogs, two chickens, a cat and a few feral kids”—and Brooklyn, her writing has a “last-frontier” humor and sensibility.

The frontier in her book is the Alaska of the 20th and 21st centuries. The earliest story takes place in a 1915 railroad camp at a time when Anchorage was an unnamed tent city; the latest stories are in Alaska today—global warming, suburbia, opioid addicts, crime.

The program consists of a reading by the author and a Q&A with Blake. It will be followed by a book signing.

Registration is required and interested people can attend in-person or by Zoom.

This is Newman’s debut short story collection, but she has already enjoyed literary success. Her memoir, Still Points North, was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard prize. Her non-fiction work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, The Oprah Magazine and other publications and her short stories have been in Harper’s, The Paris Review and elsewhere. In 2020 her work was included in The Best American Short Stories and received a Pushcart Prize and the Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize.