Book Launch: The Sapsuckers

Join us to celebrate the launch of The Sapsuckers by author Sam Farhi, in conversation with Hardy Griffin! About the book: “Don’t tell mom.” Those were the last words Rem ever told his little brother Pete in the summer of 2004 before slipping out the door of their trailer with a half-filled backpack, disappearing into the night forever. Words that haunt Pete almost as much as the ones scrawled over Rem’s lifeless body when the police found him later, hanging by a gorge in the sleepy upstate college town of Ithaca, New York. The police declared it a suicide, but for Pete and his mother Peg, the truth is something both more complicated and more simple than that. The Sapsuckers is a literary anti-mystery suffused with slow dread, a compelling exploration of our obsession with true-crime, and a mesmerizing debut that probes the tenuous connection of bonds that are forged in trauma. About the author: Sam grew up in Ithaca, NY but he is now based in Baltimore. Most recently he’s written the Hourglass films for Daniel Arsham and Adidas. His debut novel, The Sapsuckers, will be published by Spuyten Duyvil in Summer 2026. His work has appeared in The Opiate, PACKET Biweekly, ThoseThatThis, Vogue Italia Online, HBO’s New York Latino Film Festival, Yale’s Paprika! and The Wall. His zines have been sold at OHWOW Bookclub and aNYthing in downtown Manhattan. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Long Island University. About the conversation partner: Hardy Griffin recently won The Masters Review’s Summer Fiction Prize, and his writing has appeared in New Flash Fiction, Alimentum, Assisi, The Washington Post, American Letters & Commentary, and others. He wrote the chapter on Voice for The Gotham Guide to Writing Fiction (Bloomsbury).