Author RVA: On “Dream State” with Eric Puchner

Join Lit Hub senior editor and novelist Jessie Gaynor, author and NPR host Mary Childs, and CMC Director Chioke I’Anson for a series of author conversations. We’ll hear from contemporary journalists, memoirists, and writers of fiction and nonfiction about how they tackle their craft, find inspiration, and quiet the creative doubt.

For the next Author RVA event, author Eric Punchner will discuss his latest novel, Dream State, an Oprah’s Book Club pick, with Literary Hub senior editor Jessie Gaynor. Dream State interrogates the ways our past choices and mistakes haunt our present lives as it follows the intertwined fates of three friends over the course of sixty years in the American west.

The conversation will explore the nuts and bolts of both the writing and editing processes, the challenges of writing about the present and the future of climate change, how to write a funny book about grief, and the vicissitudes of the novelist’s career, among many other things.

Doors open at 5:30 p.m. with the event starting at 6:30 p.m.

About the Author: Eric Puchner is a New York Times Notable Books novelist whose books Model Home, Last Day, and Music Through the Floor have been finalists for prizes including New York Public Library Young Lions Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction; his writing has appeared in outlets including GQ, Granta, Tin House, and more.

About the Novel: Dream State begins on the eve of Cece’s wedding to Charlie, an ambitious young doctor, at his family’s vacation home in Montana. The novel follows Cece, Charlie, and Charlie’s college friend Garrett, the wedding’s officiant, who is mired in grief and guilt over the death of his and Charlie’s mutual friend, across 50 years.

Both sweeping and deeply intimate, Dream State explores the expectations we have for ourselves and our futures, the profound ramifications of loss, the trials and triumphs of parenting through our deep imperfections, and the unexpected trajectories of love and friendship, amid the landscape of an increasingly ecologically fragile world.