Annual programs

Friedman Program for Eminent Fiction Writers

November 19, 2024: Novelist Gary Shteyngart

Author of the critically acclaimed knockout novels The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, Absurdistan, and Super Sad True Love Story, Russian-born Gary Shteyngart has risen to the top of the fiction world. His latest novel, Our Country Friends, which follows a group of friends isolating together for six months during the pandemic, is a powerful story about friendship. His New York Times bestselling memoir, Little Failure, is a candid, witty, and deeply poignant account of his life so far. He shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. Off the page, Shteyngart is a masterful storyteller recounting his life as a Lenin-loving, ratty-fur-overcoat-wearing child to his anxiety-attack-prone twenties in New York. As a speaker, Shteyngart explores what it means to be an immigrant, a son, an American, a grown-up, and a writer. He was named a Granta Best Young American Novelist and a New Yorker “Best Writer Under 40.” For more information, visit https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/gary-shteyngart.

March 13, 2024: Novelist Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, all from Mariner Books. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic and an editor at large at VQR, and was guest-editor for The Best American Essays of 2022. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewanee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. Chee is a 2021 United States Artists Fellow, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction, and the recipient of a Whiting Award, an NEA Fellowship, an MCCA Fellowship, the Randy Shilts Prize in gay nonfiction, the Paul Engle Prize, the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the VCCA, Leidig Hou se, Civitella Ranieri and Amtrak. Chee is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.


November 15, 2022: A Reading and Conversation with Jennifer Egan


Jennifer Egan's 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach, has been awarded the 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Egan was born in Chicago and raised in San Francisco. She is also the author of The Invisible Circus, a novel which became a feature film starring Cameron Diaz in 2001, Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction in 2001, Emerald City and Other Stories, The Keep, and A Visit From the Goon Squad, won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harpers, Granta, McSweeney's and other magazines. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. Also a journalist, she has written frequently in the New York Times Magazine. Her 2002 cover story on homeless children received the Carroll Kowal Journalism Award, and "The Bipolar Kid" received a 2009 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for Science and Health Reporting from the National Alliance on Mental Illness. She recently completed a term as President of PEN America.


March 1, 2022: A Reading by Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott has published eight novels and an essay collection, What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her eighth novel, The Ninth Hour, was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Critics Award and The 2017 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. In 2018 it was awarded France's Prix Femina for a work in translation. Her seventh novel, Someone, 2013, was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the Dublin IMPAC Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Patterson Prize for Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Three of her previous novels, After This, At Weddings and Wakes and That Night, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Charming Billy won the National Book Award for fiction in 1998. That Night was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Harpers, Commonwealth, and elsewhere. For more than two decades she was the Richard A Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.