Contents Under Pressure
moderated by Miles Harvey

Saturday, October 19, 2024
Talks Stage, 4:15pm

Two Chicago novelists join us to share thoughts on writing narratives that deal with the enduring pressures of our time. In The Sound of a Thousand Stars, Rachel Robbins transports readers to the Los Alamos project; through the love story of two very different young Jewish physicists working at the site, Robbins explores the moral dilemmas of a world at war. Ben Tanzer’s new novel The Missing also follows a couple under pressure; the protagonists of The Missing must confront the harrowing reality that their daughter has disappeared, and as fissures in their marriage deepen, they must also reckon with each other. Fiction readers are sure to be riveted by this engaging double-header!

About the Authors

Rachel Robbins received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is now a tenured assistant professor at Malcolm X College. A visual artist and two-time Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, her paintings have materialized on public transit, children’s daycare centers, and Chicago’s Magnificent Mile.The Sound of a Thousand Stars is her debut novel, She lives in Chicago with her husband, children, and Portuguese Water Dog. The Sound of a Thousand Stars, her debut novel, is loosely based on her grandparents, who worked at Los Alamos but never spoke of their time there.

Ben Tanzer is a prose writer whose acclaimed work includes the short story collection Upstate, the science fiction novel Orphans, and the essay collections Lost in Space: A Father’s Journey There and Back Again and Be Cool—a memoir (sort of). Tanzer is also a creative strategist, podcaster, writer, teacher and social worker who has been helping nonprofits, publishers, authors, and small businesses tell their stories for more than twenty years. He lives with his family in Chicago.

Miles Harvey won the 2023 Journal Non/Fiction Prize for The Registry of Forgotten Objects, a collection of short stories. He is the author of three books of nonfiction, The King of Confidence, Painter in a Savage Land, and The Island of Lost Maps, a national and international bestseller. He teaches creative writing at DePaul University in Chicago, where he chairs the Department of English and is a founding editor of Big Shoulders Books, a nonprofit, social-justice publisher. Visit him at milesharvey.com.