August Thompson + Matt Berninger: Anyone’s Ghost

Join us for a paperback release event with acclaimed writer August Thompson, discussing his book Anyone’s Ghost. Joining August in conversation is Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter Matt Berninger. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event?

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at ZXZlbnRzIHwgc3RyYW5kYm9va3MgISBjb20= by 6/28 to request.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact .

--------------------------------------------------------------------

“Anyone’s Ghost is about so very many things: the pains of growing up, friendship and pining, drugs, sex, the frustrations of masculinity and the thrill of testing death itself. But more than any of that, it is an overwhelmingly beautiful love story. This book will make you cry.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

An extraordinary debut novel in which the transforming love and friendship between two young men during one unforgettable teenage summer in rural New England haunts them into adulthood

It took three car crashes to K*ll Jake.

Theron David Alden is there for the first two: the summer they meet in New Hampshire, when he’s fifteen and anxious, and Jake’s seventeen and a natural; then six years later in New York City, those ecstatic, painful nights that change both their lives forever.

Theron is not there for the third crash.

And yet, their story contains so much joy and self-discovery: the glorious, stupid simplicity of a boyhood joke; the devastation of insecurity; the way a great song can distill a universe; the limits of what we can know about each other; the mysterious, porous, ungraspable fault line between yourself and the person you love better than yourself; the beautiful, toxic elixir of need and hope and want.

Brimming with rare, radioactive talent, August Thompson has written a love story that is electrically alive and exquisitely tuned.

Photo credit: P.R. Brown

August Thompson was born and raised in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, before he attended middle school in West LA. After surviving California optimism, he moved to NYC for his bachelor’s, studied in Berlin, and taught English in Spain for two years. He recently received his MFA at New York University’s creative writing program as a Goldwater Fellow.

Matt Berninger is the vocalist and lyricist for Grammy Award-winning band The National. His songwriting has long garnered praise for its poignant clarity, jagged-edged wit and intimately emotive melodies. The band’s career spans ten studio albums, including First Two Pages of Frankenstein and Laugh Track, both issued in 2023. Late 2024 saw the release of The National’s first proper live album, Rome. Together with his wife Carin Besser, Berninger produced the band’s 2013 feature-length documentary Mistaken for Strangers, directed by Matt’s brother Tom. Outside of The National, Berninger formed EL VY with Brent Knopf (Menomena) in 2014. The duo released their debut album Return to the Moon the following year.

Berninger’s “gorgeous” (Rolling Stone) solo debut, Serpentine Pr*son, came out in 2020, produced by the legendary Booker T. Jones. His second solo effort, Get Sunk, is due to be released in May 2025.Berninger is also a visual artist, and spent a decade as a creative director in New York City. There’s a fluidity between his work as a painter/sculptor and lyricist/vocalist: he paints on white boards of song titles and lyrics while working in the studio, and he created a massive canvas of a pink rabbit before he ever wrote the National song of the same name. Berninger's latest medium is baseballs, on which he pens lyrics and poems across their white leather and red stitching. His songwriting is deeply rooted in his artmaking, as both lean toward fragmentary, collage-like curiosity. There is a porous boundary between artist, poet, lyricist and singer, and all contribute to Berninger’s creative wanderings.

Also check out other Music events in New York, Entertainment events in New York, Arts events in New York.