Grady Chambers - Great Disasters Book Release

Join us in celebrating the highly anticipated release of Great Disasters, a literary fiction book (Tin House 2025) by Grady Chambers. He will be joined in conversation by writer and educator Ben Hoffman.

Books will be available for purchase at the event, but we suggest grabbing one early to ensure we have enough stock for all attendees.

About the Book: For fans of Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Great Disasters is a stirring debut novel about six young men coming of age, and the enduring friendships that make us who we are—even as our paths diverge.

This is the story of how we became. I write those words but remain uncertain what they mean. . . . Drinking was a part of it. But as much as it was drinking, it was Ryan’s love for Jana. And as much as it was Ryan’s love for Jana, it was equally the war.

In the early 2000s in Chicago, six young men start high school. Though they’ve been friends since boyhood, their high school years set them on new paths: The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan begin, along with the protests against them; Ryan falls in love but struggles to hold onto it; and he and the others learn to lose themselves in alcohol. With each passing year—as they enter college or the military, then the world beyond; form new relationships with partners and children; and navigate shifting loyalties to a changing country—the narrator feels the group breaking further apart and finds himself asking: What does it mean to move forward, both with and without one another?

Grady Chambers is the author of the debut novel Great Disasters (Tin House) as well as the poetry collection North American Stadiums (Milkweed Editions, 2018), winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Grady was born and raised on the north side of Chicago, and lives in Philadelphia. His writing can be found in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, The Sun, and many other publications. Grady is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, and received his MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. More info at gradychambers.com.

Ben Hoffman's fiction has been published by American Short Fiction, Granta, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, and Zoetrope. He is the recipient of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Originally from Pennsylvania, he lives in Oak Park with his wife and children and teaches creative writing at the University of Chicago.

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