Kurt Andersen, Author of The Breakup

Join Lenox Library and The Bookstore as we welcome bestselling author Kurt Andersen to talk about his new book, The Breakup, in conversation with Brooke Allen. Natalie and Asher’s 23-year marriage has long-standing fault lines over what they think of their fellow Americans and of AI-saturated modern life. In 2045, having survived the two-year civil war together, they’re living separately for the first time since they met. Millennial Asher is in San Francisco with their daughter; Gen-Z Natalie has retreated to her home state of Tennessee in the Free American Republic. The couple’s relationship mirrors America’s own unraveling—confused, messy, painful, ambivalent, and impossibly intimate. Brought back together for a sprawling college tour with their 17-year-old, they find themselves on a road trip through a strange, uncertain new carved-up America, all while dealing with the flux—and resilience—in their own family. With the hovering question: What differences are irreconcilable, and when is something broken worth saving? Ranging from tragic to comic to suspenseful, and brimming with imagination, The Breakup is a sweeping tale of the personal and sociopolitical intersecting—bracingly plausible, keenly insightful, and surprisingly hopeful. Photo: Nina Subin Kurt Andersen is the author of Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America, A Recent History, a companion volume to Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, A 500-Year History, both of which were New York Times bestsellers. He’s also the author of the acclaimed bestselling novels You Can’t Spell America Without Me, True Believers, Heyday, and Turn of the Century. He appears regularly as a commentator on MSNOW, and contributes to The Atlantic and New York Times. He co-created and hosted the weekly public radio program Studio 360 for twenty years, co-founded Spy magazine, edited New York, and was a columnist and critic for The New Yorker and Time. Born and raised in Nebraska, Kurt lives in New York City and rural Connecticut. Brooke Allen holds a BA from the University of Virginia and a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, The Nation, New York Magazine, Time Out New York, and many other publications. She is the author of three collections of literary essays as well as several other books, including Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers. She was on the Literature faculty at Bennington College and taught classes in the History of Thought at Bennington’s Prison Education Initiative. She is married to photographer Peter Aaron and lives in Hudson, New York.