The Novel Sense dinner party series is back with our second dinner ever. The idea behind these dinners is simple: to create a space where books become more than something we consume alone, and instead become a way into conversation, into connection, and into reflection with one another.
The dinner is a 20-seat gathering centered around one book and one meal. The evening starts at 6PM with a BYOB cocktail hour and is followed by light programming on the book’s themes, a reading by Buntin, and a family-styled dinner.
Our dinner party ethos aside from great food, company, and conversation is to celebrate authors for the opportunities they give us to encounter stories unlike our own, and to return to our own with fresh eyes. We can’t wait to gather slowly, share a meal, and think together in real time using a newly published work of fiction as the centerpiece.
Our centerpiece for July’s dinner is none other than Julie Buntin’s second novel, Famous Men, published by Random House, and out on July 14.
If you want to ensure you can get your hands on a copy of Buntin’s book before the dinner party, pre-order a copy through Riff Raff or your local independent bookstore of choice!
Our host and chefs for the night are none other than the talented folks at Little Friend. Tickets are limited and the prix fixe menu will be announced in the coming weeks — food restrictions and allergies can be accommodated — with notice!
Tickets are live and at a discount — $75 per person — for paid Novel Sense substack subscribers. On July 20 — one week before dinner — we will open any remaining seats for purchase to our free substack subscribers list at $90 per person.
We hope to see you there!
From the acclaimed author of Marlena comes a vivid, uncompromising novel about a young woman looking for a father and finding herself. A gripping novel about ambition, parents and children, and all the ways women still pay for men’s mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman’s journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she’s capable of, and how she might start again:
Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother’s increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she’s found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will’s fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she’s never known?
Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he’s not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she’s only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything.
Julie Buntin’s new novel, Famous Men, is forthcoming from Random House in July. Her debut, Marlena, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, an Indie Next pick, a Nevada Statewide Read, a Michigan Notable Book, and featured by Belletrist and Book of the Month. The novel was released in ten territories worldwide and named a best book of the year by over a dozen outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and Kirkus Reviews. Buntin’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Harper’s, and The New York Times, among other publications. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the New York Community Trust. In September, Norton will publish her collaborative nonfiction project, Notes to New Mothers, co-edited with Rebecca Dinerstein Knight.