Get Lit with All Of It: Jennifer Egan with Musical Guest Steve Earle (Live and In-Person)

Overview

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Get Lit is back in The Greene Space! Join Alison Stewart, host of WNYC’s All Of It, alongside bestselling authors and fellow book lovers on the air, online, and IN-PERSON for the first time since 2020. We’ll read books and share our progress on Instagram, and Alison will talk with a marquee author during a live event in The Greene Space. Can’t make to SoHo? You can always still livestream the event from the comfort of your home. April’s book pick is The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. Grammy-winner and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Steve Earle will join as the musical guest. Earle recently served as the music director for the off-Broadway play “Coal Country” and on May 27 he will release JERRY JEFF, a tribute album to his mentor Jerry Jeff Walker.

About This Month’s Book

Spanning decades, with an intricate plot and interconnected characters, The Candy House is that rare thing: a book that is both pure pleasure on the sentence level and wildly ambitious in scope. In these pages we meet a tech billionaire who ushers in a new age of enhanced digital sharing, the anthropologist who unwittingly enabled this new era, “eluders” who seek to retain privacy and discretion in the face of the onslaught, and the “proxies” who impersonate them, plus record producers, aging rock stars and movie stars, spies, publicists, writers, academics, mothers, fathers, and children. Set in San Francisco, New York City, suburban country clubs, a beatnik forest enclave, the desert, and the mysterious nation of X, with entwined characters and plot points that overlap with A Visit from the Goon Squad, this is a dazzling achievement.

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.

Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times Magazine.

Credit: Photo provided by guest

Steve Earle is one of the most acclaimed singer-songwriters of his generation. A protégé of legendary songwriters Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, he quickly became a master storyteller in his own right, with his songs being recorded by Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, The Pretenders, and countless others. 1986 saw the release of his debut record, Guitar Town, which shot to No. 1 on the Country Charts and is now regarded as a classic of the Americana genre. Subsequent releases like The Revolution Starts…Now (2004), Washington Square Serenade (2007), and TOWNES (2009) received consecutive GRAMMY® Awards. Restlessly creative across artistic disciplines, Earle has published both a novel and a collection of short stories; produced albums for other artists such as Joan Baez and Lucinda Williams, and acted in films, television (including David Simon’s acclaimed The Wire), and on the stage. He currently hosts a radio show for Sirius XM.