Join us for an evening of fascinating conversation with best-selling author Curtis Sittenfeld who will be joined by Iowa Public Radio's Charity Nebbe. Each ticket includes a copy of Show, Don't Tell. It's a funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition—including a story that revisits the main character from Curtis Sittenfeld’s iconic novel Prep—from the New York Times bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy. A booksigning will follow her talk.
In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their longheld beliefs are overturned.
In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age,” a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “A for Alone,” a married middle-aged artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone without lusting after each other. And in “Lost but Not Forgotten,” Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school.
Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld’s stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.
Curtis Sittenfeld is the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels including Romantic Comedy, Rodham, Eligible, Prep, American Wife, and Sisterland, as well as the collection You Think It, I’ll Say It. Her novels have been translated into thirty languages. In addition, her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, for which she has also been the guest editor. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Vanity Fair, and on public radio’s This American Life. Her second short story
collection Show Don’t Tell is forthcoming from Random House in February 2025.
Charity Nebbe is the host of Talk of Iowa, a daily interview program on Iowa Public Radio. She also hosts the IPR podcasts Unsettled and Garden Variety and leads the Talk of Iowa Book Club. You can also see her on Iowa PBS where she hosts Iowa Life and Iowa Ingredient.
