Join us for a reading with Kevin Moffett, who will read from his new novel, Only Son. An audience Q&A will follow. This in-person event will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Florida, 1982. A nine-year-old watches as his dead father’s possessions are hauled away: his clothes and tools, his faux-leather recliner. His sensei says it’s a perfect time to turn his weaknesses into weapons. His PE teacher says he runs like a pregnant ostrich. His mother takes out a personal ad. Everyone is trying to teach him a lesson but he is, it seems, a slow learner. Meanwhile, with each passing day, his father recedes, growing less and less plausible, almost a myth.
Twenty-five years later, adrift in suburban Southern California, married with a son of his own, he’s still trying to sort through the fragments of his father’s death while imparting his own sketchy education onto his son. Which snakes are poisonous? Why did I tell him that Candyland is based on a true story? Why has he stopped asking me to go skateboarding with him and his friends? After discovering a travel journal he didn’t know his father kept, he and his son light out on a road trip, retracing the father’s mystifying journey.
They drive up the Pacific Coast, foggy, overtaken by beauty. As he strains to decipher his father’s notes, his relationship with his son begins to take on new heft and shape. With wit and compassion, Moffett delivers a bracingly intimate account of fatherhood, and discovery, and the experiences of two men far from home.
About the Author: Kevin Moffett is the author of two short story collections, as well as The Silent History, a narrative app for mobile devices. Only Son, a novel, is forthcoming from McSweeney’s Publishing in fall 2025. His work has been awarded the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a literature fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. A frequent contributor to McSweeney’s, his stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, Harvard Review, American Short Fiction, Chicago Tribune, The Believer, A Public Space, and in four editions of The Best American Short Stories. He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.
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