Tom PiazzaThe Auburn Conference: A Novel

Just finished this amazing book, packed into less than 200 pages, and I'm trying to figure out how to recommend it to you so you can really get how worthwhile it is to read. It's being called a masterpiece, and I agree. A well written novel, compelling--like can't wait to see what happens next, but mostly the perspective on life in the U S of A, twenty years after the Civil War, and indirectly now. The characters: Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson (though that may deserve a little bit of a spoiler alert) with cameos by Harriet Tubman, and fictitious others. It's about writers, literature, life--inner and outer, history, human nature and therefore the nature of countries, politics, society. If you're in our family and friends gifting circle at the holidays, anticipate finding this one under the bows. The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza. And if you're involved in movie making/TV streaming, it's very cinematic. The author was principle writer for the HBO series Treme.

Brilliant plot and characters. I enjoyed The Auburn Conference so much that I immediately gifted a copy to an avid reader.I cannot wait to read more of Piazza's body of works.

When writing in his own voice, Piazza reminds me of Twain in style and sensibility: pure enjoyment and sad to come to the end!When speaking or writing in the guise of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Whitman. Melville, Dickensen, etc., you see Piazza's musician's ear, masterfully orchestrating the voice, personality, and moral engine of each in turn.Picaresque yet also deadly serious, addressing current American comedies and tragedies through voices from the past.MUST read.

He is thrilled with this book . A new Dad do not a long read , just that he wanted

What a literary tour de force.! Tom Piazza (one of my very favorite NOLA writer’s) has created a wildly imaginative tale of a literary symposium set in 1883 in upstate New York: Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, Confederate apologist Forrest Taylor and romance novelist Lucy Comstock come together to form the most unlikely panel. This page turner is a novel that manages to be both historically accurate yet timeless and evocative of the very same cultural conflicts and clashes that confront contemporary America. Prescient in a way that is really thought provoking!