Join us for a celebratory evening as we celebrate the release of Patrick McGinty’s Town College City Road. Patrick will be in conversation with Candance Jane Opper and Sarah Marshall
About Town College City Road
An emotionally complex coming-of-age story — Kirkus Reviews
Town College City Road will leave readers both shattered and strangely hopeful—a brilliant, unmissable novel that cements a major literary talent — Chelsea Bieker, author of Madwoman and Godshot
A queer Rust Belt coming-of-age novel, Town College City Road follows Kurt Boozel from childhood in an insular Northwestern Pennsylvania steel town through life’s booms and busts, and back to his Rust Belt home. As a teenage math whiz, Kurt is bullied but relishes the opportunity to tutor his high school’s star athlete. After their friendship ends in a public and emasculating act of violence, Kurt steers his life progressively eastward, first as a closeted economics major clinging to the coattails of his richer fraternity brothers, then to New York for a high-pressure finance job. After turning his attention to the fantastic promises of the cryptocurrency market, he finds himself unmoored while driving across Pennsylvania in the midst of a snowstorm to be the best man at his brother’s wedding.
Through his struggles to pass multiple masculine initiations, both real and metaphorical, Kurt ultimately discovers that the only thing tougher than running away from rural mythology is constructing a new one
Patrick McGinty teaches at Slippery Rock University and serves on the executive council for his statewide faculty union, APSCUF. He is the author of Test Drive (Propeller Press, 2022), a novel about Pittsburgh’s driverless car sector
Candace Jane Opper is a writer, a mother, a visual artist, and a numbers person. She is the author of Certain and Impossible Events, selected by Cheryl Strayed as the winner of a Kore Press Memoir Award and featured in NPR’s 2021 Books We Love
Sarah Marshall is a writer, podcaster, and media critic focused on setting straight our collective memory. She is the co-host of the popular modern history podcast You’re Wrong About, which has been highlighted in the New Yorker, the Guardian and Time Magazine