The Center for Fiction Presents Garrard Conley on All the World Beside with Marlon James

New York Times bestselling author Garrard Conley joins The Center for Fiction to celebrate his first novel All the World Beside. Known for his electrifying memoir Boy Erased, Conley’s latest work is a deeply moving queer love story set in Puritan New England. All the World Beside follows the characters of Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and physician Arthur Lyman, two men who fall in love with each other despite the confines of their dogmatic Christian community. Nathaniel and Arthur’s love entangles their families in a complicated web of secrets as the two imagine an impossible future for themselves. With this page-turning intimate novel, Conley “gives us historical fiction at its most delicious and absorbing” (Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox). Joining Conley is esteemed Jamaican writer Marlon James, author of such novels as Black Leopard, Red Wolf and A Brief History of Seven Killings. Conley and James will have a vibrant conversation on the novel and its themes of queer love and zealotry, a tension both authors have explored in their work to great acclaim. After the conversation, Conley will sign books.