Get Lit with All Of It: Hernan Diaz (Virtual)

Overview

Get Lit is back in The Greene Space! Join Alison Stewart, host of WNYC’s All Of It, alongside bestselling author Hernan Diaz and fellow book lovers for this virtual book club event. This month, we’re reading Diaz’s TRUST. Alison will talk with a marquee author during a live event in The Greene Space. Until then, follow along as we share our progress on Instagram.

This month’s musical guest is Shaina Taub, singer, songwriter, and creator and composer of the off-Broadway musical SUFFS, which will have just finished its multi-month sold-out run at the Public Theater. The musical stars Taub as Alice Paul and follows the women’s suffrage movement leading up to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Taub also has a new a new album out, titled Songs of the Great Hill. She joins us for a special performance.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.

Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, TRUST engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.

How It Works

Join the Club. Follow our book club on the All Of It Instagram page, @ALLOFITWNYC. In our stories, you’ll find polls, questions, fun facts, comments, and snapshots of listeners reading along with us.
Get a copy of the book. Since, you know, it’s a book club. Buy a copy from your local independent bookseller, or download a free, 3-week e-book copy from the New York Public Library!
Reach out to a friend, and read along with Alison and the All Of It team.

All Of It teams up with the New York Public Library so that New Yorkers can access the book for free through the NYPL app.

Credit: Photo provided by guest.

Hernan Diaz is the author of two novels translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also written a book of essays, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

Credit: Photo by Jimmy Fontaine

Shaina Taub is a singer/songwriter classically trained in piano and voice, and self-taught on accordion. Performing in musical theater since age 3, Billboard writes “To call Taub — who sings, acts, plays piano and accordion and is published, like [Lin Manuel] Miranda, by Warner Chappell — prolific would be an extreme understatement.” Her recent projects include having written lyrics for the upcoming The Devil Wears Prada Broadway musical with music by Sir Elton John, and having written a book, music, and lyrics for the Broadway musical Suffs. She starred as Alice Paul in the production at the Public Theater (where she’s an artist-in-residence). She has also written songs for Netflix, Sesame Street, and co-wrote the 2018 Tony Awards opening number with Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban which was nominated for an Emmy Award.

Shaina is also celebrating the release of her debut Atlantic Records album, Songs Of The Great Hill, released April 1st. Written during the pandemic and produced by 3x GRAMMY® Award nominee Josh Kaufman (The National, Bonny Light Horseman, The Hold Steady), Songs of the Great Hill spotlights Taub’s wildly eclectic range and incandescent talent as she seeks to extend a feeling of community to her audience, and ultimately provide them with a powerful antidote to cynicism and despair.