Chris Pavone, Jenny Jackson and Rumaan Alam: The New York Novel in the New Gilded Age

Three acclaimed writers who are bringing the New York City novel into the 21st century join us for a sharp and urgent conversation about the new literature of wealth and class.

From Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald to J.D. Salinger and James Baldwin, New York’s great storytellers have long grappled with how money and class shape the city. Now, in the midst of political upheaval, gentrification, and a new Gilded Age, a wave of writers has taken up the mantle of the New York novel with books that wrestle with what it means to live in the city today. In Chris Pavone’s The Doorman, a man working in a world-famous building for the city’s cosmopolitan elite weighs his livelihood against a night of violence and protest. In Jenny Jackson’s Pineapple Street, three women comically navigate love and family in the labyrinthine world of one wealthy Brooklyn clan. And in Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement, an assistant to an octogenarian billionaire tries to help her boss in his quest to give away a vast fortune.

What is the role of money and class in 21st-century New York? How have class politics and its mythic distortions changed since the days of The Great Gatsby? Who today is telling the stories that will shape our vision of the city for the future? Don’t miss an evening of conversation with three vital writers about the new novels that define New York City.

“The Doorman naturally invites comparison to The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s lacerating dissection of New York in the 1980s … But Pavone’s humor is more humane, his sympathy for the characters’ struggles and contradictions more acute.” — Sarah Lyall, The New York Times

“Chris Pavone has always been good, but this novel is way better than good. The kind of novel that wins book awards. Cynical, tender, sharp, dense, funny, and loaded with inside dope about how New York works (and how it doesn’t).” — Stephen King