In Conversation: Death Unbecoming

Lisa Birnbach is a bestselling author, journalist, and cultural commentator best known for The Official Preppy Handbook and True Prep. Lisa has published 20 books and has contributed to many publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, New York, Rolling Stone and others. She also served as the Deputy Editor of Spy Magazine. She is the host of “Five Things that Make Life Better,” a weekly interview podcast, available on all major platforms.

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls. Her most recent novel is A Book of American Martyrs. In Night Sleep Death The Stars (Ecco) Joyce Carol Oates offers a gripping examination of contemporary America through the prism of a family tragedy: when a powerful parent dies, each of his adult children reacts in startling and unexpected ways, and his grieving widow in the most surprising way of all. This novel is a vivid exploration of race, psychological trauma, class warfare, grief, and eventual healing, as well as an intimate family novel in the tradition of the author’s bestselling We Were the Mulvaneys. Publishers Weekly praised it as “a brooding, thoughtful study of how people respond to stress and loss, which is not always well and not always nicely. Yet, somehow, everyone endures, some experience unexpected happiness, and the story ends on a note that finds hope amid sorrow and division.”