Providence based author Lucas Mann reads from his new book Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV, out from Penguin Random House. After the reading Lucas will be in conversation with Vikki Warner, author of Tenemental, followed by a Q&A and book signing. Join us for a night of books, writers, and wine!
About Captive Audience :
An intimate portrait of a marriage intertwined with a mediation on reality TV and what it means to live an authentic life.
In Lucas Mann's trademark vein—fiercely intelligent, self-deprecating, brilliantly observed, idiosyncratic, personal, funny, and infuriating—Captive Audience is an appreciation of reality television wrapped inside a love letter to his wife, with whom he shares the guilty pleasure of watching "real" people bare their souls in search of celebrity. Captive Audience resides at the intersection of popular culture with the personal; the exhibitionist impulse, with the schadenfreude of the vicarious, and in confronting some of our most suspect impulses achieves a heightened sense of what it means to live an authentic life and what it means to love a person.
“Over and over again, while reading Captive Audience, I was struck by Lucas Mann’s refusal to be satisfied by the insights that might satisfy another writer. Instead, he questions each of these insights: digs under it, complicates it, wonders why he felt inspired to utter it, wonders if its opposite might be just as true. The idea of epiphany makes him restless, but this restlessness is a gift to the rest of us. And running like a passionate ribbon through all of his ferocious questioning—about authenticity, presence, self-awareness and self-possession—is an unapologetic love story, full of the daily performances and unexpected grace of reality itself.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams & The Recovering
“This is book is about what it means to see and be seen. And more: it is about what it means to see and be seen in love. Lucas Mann always writes openly, even ecstatically, at the boundaries of the essay form. Captive Audience offers the pleasure of reading all these things: memoir, lucid cultural analysis, TV Guide, journalism, and, most of all, glorious love letters hurting with shared joys and naked vulnerability.”
—Amitava Kumar, author of Immigrant, Montana
About Tenemental :
Detouring from the traditional timeline of marriage-kids-house, twenty-six-year-old Vikki Warner skips straight to home ownership and buys a run-down three-story house in Providence, Rhode Island. Suddenly, she's responsible for a rotating cast of colorful tenants, and adulthood means exploding plumbing, gentrification, and navigating the 2008 market crash with no blueprint. Told with grit and good humor, this debut memoir is a candid exploration into how sharing space profoundly reshapes our lives and forces us to grow into ourselves.
"Forget the marriage plot; 26-year-old Warner is after a plot of land. . . . [An] ebullient memoir."
—O, The Oprah Magazine
"Refreshingly original reading."
—Kirkus Reviews