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Berkeley Arts & Letters is a project bringing writers and thinkers together with readers for inspiration, provocation, education, and sharing conversations. Produced by Melissa Mytinger and Praveen Madan, we welcome everyone who's interested in civil discourse, curiosity...and the pleasure of words.

ERIC PUCHNER / Model Home: A Novel

Start: March 2, 2010 - 7:30pm

"Eric Puchner's Model Home is 1980s California in a nutshell: bright and frantic, giddy and broke, desperate and strong and always, always moving."

– Daniel Handler, author of Adverbs

Eric Puchner’s Music Through the Floor was one of the best-received story collections in years. His debut novel, a sweeping yet intimate story of the American dream in remission, viewed through the microscope of a single family, proves yet again just “how exhilarating it is to come across a young writer as technically gifted and emotionally insightful as Eric Puchner” (The New York Times Book Review)

The Zillers – Warren, Camille, and their three children – live the good life in a gated Southern California neighborhood, but the sun-bright veneer hides a starker reality. As Warren desperately tries to conceal a failing real estate venture, his family falls prey to secrets and misunderstandings, both hilarious and painful, that open fault lines in their intimacy. Their misguided attempts to recover their former closeness, or find it elsewhere, lead them into late-night burglary, improbably romance, and strange acts of betrayal. When tragedy strikes, the Zillers are forced to move to one of the houses in Warren’s abandoned development in the desert. By turns tender and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Model Home is a masterful display of Eric Puchner’s prodigious gifts and penetrating insight – both into the American family and into the imperfect ways we try to connect.

Location:

The Booksmith
1644 Haight Street
San Francisco, California 94117