The Auburn Conference, Tom Piazza
The Auburn Conference, Tom Piazza
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The Auburn Conference
A Novel

Author: Tom Piazza

Narrator: Mirron Willis

Unabridged: 6 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/02/2023

Synopsis

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.

About Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza is celebrated both as a novelist and as a writer on American music. His twelve books include the novels A Free State and City of Refuge, the post-Katrina manifesto Why New Orleans Matters, and Devil Sent the Rain, a collection of his essays and journalism. He was a principal writer for the innovative HBO drama series Treme, a four-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for Music Writing, and the winner of a Grammy Award for his album notes to Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues: A Musical Journey. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he lives in New Orleans, where he is at work on a new novel.

About Mirron Willis

Mirron Willis—actor of film, stage, and television—is the winner of the prestigious Audie Award for best narration in 2012 and a finalist for the Audie in 2015, as well as the winner of four AudioFile Earphones Awards for his audiobook recordings. He has worked extensively in film and television and on stage with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Houston Shakespeare Festival, and the Ensemble Theatre, among others. He has recorded some 150 audiobooks, including the Smokey Dalton series by Kris Nelscott and My Song by Harry Belafonte. He resides and records audiobooks on his family’s historic ranch in East Texas.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Bryn on December 27, 2023

What an absolutely fascinating book. It’s the story of an unknown English professor who organizes a writers conference in 1883 with Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglas, Mark Twain, and Harriet Beecher Stowe as the main participants. The theme is “What is an American?” For answers he get......more

Goodreads review by Claire on February 24, 2024

This little book came to my attention via the Tournament of Books and I’m very glad it did. The Auburn Conference very much tickled the intersection of my history and literature interests. I don’t always do well with imagined stories that are peopled with real characters, but in this case I think th......more

Goodreads review by Melissa on June 18, 2023

An excellent imagination of what would have occurred if a group of literary and societal giants of the time were brought together to discuss their abstract idealism in real time. In part’s hilarious and in others unutterably sad that things have changed so little, this is a tour de force. Pick this......more

Quotes

“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.” Booklist (starred review)

“The intriguing mix of humor and underlying seriousness makes this an engaging change of pace for an author better known for his writings on music and New Orleans…Readable and entertaining.” Kirkus Reviews

“Piazza doesn’t force anything, and he doesn’t miss a trick.” Roy Blount Jr., author, NPR contributor

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