Shakespeare & Co. is delighted to host a reading and discussion with award-winning author Eric Puchner, in conversation with Mark Sundeen, on Tuesday, August 12 at 7:00 pm. Eric will read from his new novel Dream State (an Oprah Book Club Pick). This event is free and open to the public.

About Dream State:
Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws’ lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony, though Cece can’t imagine anyone more ill-suited for the task—an airport baggage handler haunted by a tragedy from his and Charlie’s shared past. But as Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. And why does Garrett, after meeting Cece, begin to feel, well, human again? As a contagious stomach flu threatens to scuttle the wedding, and Charlie and Garrett’s friendship is put to the ultimate test, Cece must decide between the life she’s dreamed of and a life she’s never imagined.

The events of that summer have long-lasting repercussions, not only on the three friends caught in its shadow but also on their children, who struggle to escape their parents’ story. Spanning fifty years and set against the backdrop of a rapidly warming Montana, Dream State explores what it means to live with the mistakes of the past—both our own and the ones we’ve inherited. 

Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.

Author Biographies:
Eric Puchner is an award-winning, New York Times Notable novelist whose books Model Home, Last Day, and Music Through the Floor have been finalists for prizes including New York Public Library Young Lions Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction; his writing has appeared in outlets including GQ, Granta, Tin House, and beyond. With his latest novel, he has reached new creative heights and is poised for a mid-career breakout. For readers of Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House, Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, and Adam Haslett’s Imagine Me Gone, Dream State similarly interrogates the ways our past choices and mistakes haunt our present lives, following the intertwined fates of three friends over the course of sixty years in the America west.

Mark Sundeen is the author of four other books about the American West: The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today’s America; Car Camping: The Book of Desert Adventures; The Making of Toro: Bullfights, Broken Hearts, and One Author’s Quest for the Acclaim He Deserves; and The Man Who Quit Money, which was a national bestseller and has been translated into six languages. A contributing editor for Outside Magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, The Believer, and Best American Essays. He is an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana.

Mark Sundeen