Books Over Drinks with Hernan Diaz

We are thrilled to spend the evening with New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominee Hernan Diaz! Winner of the Kirkus Prize and longlisted for the Booker Prize, Trust was one of the most celebrated novels of 2022. With the release of the paperback edition, Diaz is joining us to discuss his process, digging into a wild period in American history, and how that ripples through to current times. We can’t wait to hear Diaz discuss Trust and his storied career with a signature cocktail in hand. Don’t miss it!

Your ticket includes admission, a cocktail, and a copy of the book.

BOOK SUMMARY

From an award-winning chronicler of our nation’s history and its legends comes his much-anticipated novel about wealth and talent, trust and intimacy, truth and perception. 

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the brilliant daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth. But the secrets around their affluence and grandeur incites gossip. Rumors about Benjamin’s financial maneuvers and Helen’s reclusiveness start to spread–all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. At what cost have they acquired their immense fortune?

This is the mystery at the center of a successful 1938 novel entitled Bonds, which all of New York seems to have read. But it isn’t the only version.

Hernan Diaz’s Trust brilliantly puts the story of these characters into conversation with other accounts–and in tension with the life and perspective of a young woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that becomes more exhilarating and profound with each new layer and revelation. Provocative and propulsive, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the reality-warping gravitational pull of money and how power often manipulates facts. An elegant, multifaceted epic that recovers the voices buried under the myths that justify our foundational inequality, Trust is a literary triumph with a beating heart and urgent stakes.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hernan Diaz is the author of two novels translated into more than twenty languages. His first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also written a book of essays, and his work has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, The Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.

REVIEWS

“Hernan Diaz is a narrative genius whose work easily encompasses both a grand scope and the crisp and whiplike line. Trust builds its world and characters with subtle aplomb. What a radiant, profound and moving novel.”

—Lauren Groff

“Hernan Diaz understands, and deeply, how strange money is, as an omnipotent and imaginary substance that controls our lives. His novel Trust glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery. Its plotlines are as etched and surreal as Art Deco geometry, while inside that architecture are people who feel appallingly real. This novel is very classical and very original: Balzac would be proud, but so would Borges.”—Rachel Kushner

“Though set in a historical New York, Trust speaks to matters of the most urgent significance to the present day. Money, power, class, marital and filial relations, the roles played by trust and betrayal in human affairs—Diaz’s development of his chosen themes is deeply insightful. Cleverly constructed and rich in surprises, this splendid novel offers serious ideas and serious pleasures on every beautifully composed page.”—Sigrid Nunez

“That rare jewel of a book—jaw-dropping storytelling against the backdrop of beautiful writing. Amidst all the noise in the world, whole days found me curled up on the couch, lost inside Diaz’s brilliance.”—Jacqueline Woodson

“The audacity and scope of Hernan Diaz’s extraordinary novel— a prism, a mystery, a revelation—are brilliantly matched by the quality of his prose.”—Jean Strouse

“In this glorious puzzle of a novel, perspectives keep shifting and the wealth of one early-twentieth-century family keeps changing its origin-story. What a joy this is to read, suspenseful at every turn, the work of a rare and impressive talent. Hernan Diaz has once again taken apart an American myth and pondered how we lie to ourselves.”—Joan Silber

“Sublime, richly layered novel. A story within a story within a story. Elegantly written . . . This is just sublime.”

—Roxane Gay

“Diaz’s spotlight on stories behind stories seeks out the dark workings behind capitalism, as well as the uncredited figures behind the so-called Great Men of history. It’s an exhilarating pursuit.”—The New York Times (10 Best Books of 2022)

“The only certainty here is Diaz’s brilliance and the value of his rewarding book . . . In execution, [Trust] is an elegant, irresistible puzzle. The novel isn’t just about the way history and biography are written; it’s a demonstration of that process. By the end, the only voice I had any faith in belonged to Diaz.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post (10 Best Books of 2022)

“Trust is an ingeniously constructed historical novel with a postmodern point: namely, that readers can’t wholly ‘trust any of the slippery stories we read here”—Maureen Corrigan, NPR (Top 10 Books of 2022)

“Diaz cleverly weaves . . . disparate strands together while showing how our shifting perception of the story relates to wealth’s ability to ‘bend and align reality’ to its own motives.”—The New Yorker (12 Best books of 2022)