Adam Ross — Playworld - with Elliot Ackerman

Griffin Hurt is in over his head. Between his role as Peter Proton on the hit TV show The Nuclear Family and the pressure of high school at New York's elite Boyd Prep--along with the increasingly compromising demands of his wrestling coach--he's teetering on the edge of collapse. Then comes Naomi Shah, twenty-two years Griffin's senior. Unwilling to lay his burdens on his shrink--whom he shares with his father, mother, and younger brother, Oren--Griffin soon finds himself in the back of Naomi's Mercedes sedan, again and again, confessing all to the one person who might do him the most harm. Less a bildungsroman than a story of miseducation, Playworld is a novel of epic proportions, bursting with laughter and heartache. Adam Ross immerses us in the life of Griffin and his loving (yet disintegrating) family while seeming to evoke the entirety of Manhattan and the ethos of an era--with Jimmy Carter on his way out and a B-list celebrity named Ronald Reagan on his way in. Surrounded by adults who embody the age's excesses--and who seem to care little about what their children are up to--Griffin is left to himself to find the line between youth and maturity, dependence and love, acting and truly grappling with life. PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780385351294?ic_referral=zfr8466SqRKZZr_eDcMoZzJvtMjlcgMiVdCaKVJIlY4wMxuPCrOdph_jOSIB3aqEPE84DGoyqwsb3n0mY35HeDF00YkbG0C8k8AdDfVIcHAJWSoZ92zDRGfPCOOznohg4YjBjQ Adam Ross is the author of Mr. Peanut, which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist. He has been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review. Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters.  Ross will be in conversation with Elliot Ackerman, author of the novels Halcyon, Red Dress in Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, and the memoirs The Fifth Act and Places and Names. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He is currently a contributing writer at The Atlantic.