Author Talk Series: Nathan Hill and Michelle Richmond
We’ve been trying for more than a year to get these writers to Amigo Road, and we’re very excited about hosting them on June 24. Nathan Hill is the author of the oddball masterpiece debut novel The Nix, which the San Francisco Chronicle heralded – in a review written by Wellstone Center co-director Steve Kettmann – as “a feat of levitation that wears its seriousness lightly and functions almost as smelling salts for the imagination.” It tells the story of a stalled writer named Samuel Andresen-Anderson, wounded for life by his childhood abandonment by his mother, must go in search of answers from her past – and his – and along the way, the chaos in the streets during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago is evoked and explored as never before. Michelle Richmond is a San Francisco author whose novels include Golden State (2014), which anticipated Donald Trump with uncanny accuracy in some ways. As Richmond explained in an interview, the novel features “a President who wants to spend $12 billion of taxpayer money on a border wall with Mexico, he wants a war with Iran, he wants to roll back environmental protections and he’s rolling back reproductive and gay rights.” Richmond likes to focus on ordinary people in tense situations.