Caleb Crain Presents Overthrow

Join us for a dramatic reading of Caleb Crain’s Overthrow, featuring readers: Christine Smallwood, Jana Prikryl, Dan Smith, and Leon Neyfakh.

About the book:
One autumn night, as a grad student named Matthew is walking home from the subway, a handsome skateboarder catches his eye. Leif, mesmerizing and enigmatic, invites Matthew to meet his friends, who are experimenting with tarot cards. It’s easier to know what’s in other people’s minds than most people realize, the friends claim. Do they believe in telepathy? Can they actually do it? Though Matthew should be writing his dissertation on the poetry of kingship, he soon finds himself falling in love with Leif—a poet of the internet age—and entangled with Leif’s group as they visit the Occupy movement’s encampment across the river, where they hope their ideas about radical empathy will help heal a divided world and destabilize the 1%.

When the group falls afoul of a security contractor freelancing for the government, the news coverage, internet outrage, and legal repercussions damage the romances and alliances that hold the friends together, and complicate the faith the members of the group have—or, in some cases, don’t have—in the powers they’ve been nurturing. Elspeth and Raleigh, two of Leif’s oldest friends, will see if their relationship can weather the strains of criminal charges; Chris and Julia, who drifted into the group more recently, will have their loyalties tested; and Matthew, entranced by the man at the center of it all, will have to decide what he owes Leif and how much he’s willing to give him. All six will be forced to reckon with the ambiguous nature of transparency and with the insidious natures of power and privilege.

Caleb Crain has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, n+1, and The New York Times Book Review. He is the author of the novel Necessary Errors and the critical study American Sympathy. He was born in Texas, grew up in Massachusetts, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

This event is free!