Thursday, November 16, 2017
8pm

Matthew Weiner
in conversation with Susan Orlean

discussing his novel, 
Heather, The Totality

Ann and Jerry Moss Theatre
New Roads School
Herb Alpert Educational Village
3131 Olympic Boulevard
Santa Monica, CA 90404

*This event is cancelled. All attendees will receive refunds.

Matthew Weiner has been entertaining audiences for two decades, most recently as writer, creator, executive producer, and director of Mad Men, one of television’s most honored series. He also worked as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos, along with several comedy series, and made his feature film debut in 2014. Weiner studied at Wesleyan University and earned his MFA from USC School of Cinema and Television.

“Heather, The Totality is a tour de force of control, tone and razor-slash insight. In its clear-eyed anatomist’s gaze and its remarkable combination of empathy and pitilessness. I hear echoes of Flaubert and Richard Yates, with a deeply twisted twist of Muriel Spark at her darkest.  I could not put it down.” —Author Michael Chabon

“This short novel of upper-crust anomie and class-divide obsession is a scorcher! It’s the classic noir construction: the short walk off the long ledge and the plummet to an indifferent Hell. Matthew Weiner demonically delivers the goods! Read this book in one gasping breath.” —Author James Ellroy

Video: Matthew Weiner’s creative solution for eliminating doubt

Critics have described Matthew Weiner’s writing as compelling, seductive, smart, insightful, and original. For many years we’ve been fortunate to watch his captivating, complex, and chilling American stories unfold on the screen. Now comes this master storyteller’s brilliant, unnerving debut novel, Heather, The Totality.

Susan Orlean is the author of eight books, including The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup; My Kind of Place; Saturday Night; and Lazy Little Loafers. In 1999, she published The Orchid Thief, a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida, which was made into the Academy Award-winning film, Adaptation starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Her book, Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, a New York Times Notable book, won the Ohioana Book Award and the Richard Wall Memorial Award.  She is currently writing a book about the Los Angeles Public Library, to be published in 2018.

Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992, covering such subjects as taxidermy, fashion, umbrellas, origami, dogs, and chickens. She previously interviewed T.C. Boyle at Live Talks Los Angeles. (Video)