Adam O'Fallon Price discusses his debut novel, The Grand Tour

Tue 8/9, 7pm – 8pm
Adam O'Fallon Price discusses his debut novel, The Grand Tour

“As shrewd as it is hilarious, The Grand Tour offers the reader something to wince and laugh at in nearly every sculpted sentence. This is a triumphant debut, rich in pointed, poignant truths about books, America and men.”

—Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

A bitingly funny, smart and moving road novel about two hapless lost souls—an alcoholic Vietnam veteran turned bestselling author, and his awkward, shy college student superfan—who form an unlikely connection on the world's most disastrous book tour.

Richard Lazar is advancing in years but regressing in life. After a career as a literary novelist that has ground to a halt and landed him in a trailer in Phoenix, Richard is surprised to find sudden success publishing a gritty memoir about his service in Vietnam. Sent on a book tour by his publishing house, Richard encounters his biggest (and really only) fan: an awkward, despondent student named Vance with issues of his own (an absentee father, a depressive mother, his own acute shyness). Soon Vance has volunteered to chauffeur Richard for the rest of the book tour, and the two embark on a disastrous but often hilarious cross-country trip. When things go wrong, Richard and Vance forge an unlikely bond between two misanthropes whose mutual insecurities and disdain for the world force both to look at each other, and their lives, in a more meaningful way.

As they reach the end of the book tour, The Grand Tourultimately becomes a moving tale of unlikely friendship that should catapult Adam O'Fallon Price into the company of such masters of All-American dyspepsia as Sam Lipsyte, David Gates and Walter Kirn.

Adam O’Fallon Price was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia and Knoxville, Tennessee. He received an MFA from Cornell University, where he taught writing. His fiction has appeared in Narrative, The Iowa Review, Glimmer Train, EPOCH, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Iowa City, Iowa.

 

Event date: 
Tuesday, August 9, 2016 - 7:00pm
Event address: 
752 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Chapel Hill, NC 27514