Man Enough?
with David Szalay and Patrick deWitt
Hosted by Peter Schneider
Fall Festival In Person Streaming Fiction
Reader, I understand that I’m supposed to entice you with a comparison like ‘what if Hal Ashby directed a Charles Portis book’ but what’s troubling me is that Dodge City appears to be an instance of a perfect novel, which by my account is a thing a novel is never allowed to be, especially one that is poised like this on the knife’s edge of hilarity and tenderness. So I’d better read it again and find some flaw and get back to you.
We conclude the 2026 Fall Edition with the return of two internationally acclaimed bestsellers, Booker Prize winner, David Szalay and Governor General’s Literary Award winner Patrick deWitt.
Flesh by David Szalay, is a propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour—a married woman close to his mother’s age—as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that István himself can barely understand. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the currents of the twenty-first century’s tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London’s super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely.
Dodge City by Patrick deWitt is a rollicking novel about a young man on an amphetamine-fueled cross-country road trip, fleeing the draft for the safe haven of Canada. It’s 1967 in Los Angeles and Lee Clarke is forced to make the first political decision of his life: he will leave the country and head for the border. Bringing only a single suitcase and a bag of amphetamines, he makes his stimulated progress against the width of the country, pining for the life he’s left behind and wondering what his decision will mean for his future.
Books are available for purchase from our friends at Perfect Books.
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