NYRB: Jean Stafford's "Boston Adventure," with Rumaan Alam, Kathryn Davis & Ann Hulbert

Rumaan Alam, Kathryn Davis, and Ann Hulbert joined us for a panel discussion of Jean Stafford's début, "Boston Adventure," newly reissued by NYRB Classics. This program is part of our ongoing series with NYRB and took place on Zoom.
If you'd like to purchase a copy of "Boston Adventure" (and support Community Bookstore), you can do so here: www.communityb...
About "Boston Adventure"
Growing up in a fishing village north of Boston between the wars, Sonie, the child of immigrants, is so poor that she must “sleep on a pallet made of old coats and comforters.” She can only dream of the feather beds and perfumed soap to be found in the great city across the bay. In the summers, while helping her mother clean rooms in a shoreside hotel, she keeps company with the austere and fascinating Miss Pride. Years pass, and Sonie-now the caretaker of her fragile mother-receives an invitation from Miss Pride to move to Beacon Hill and be her personal secretary. Salvation, she thinks, is at hand. In Boston, Sonie does come to know a new and broader world, one in which she mingles with both blue bloods and louche European refugees, and yet her troubles, she discovers, are hardly over.
Boston Adventure was published when Jean Stafford was twenty-nine, and it was an immediate best seller. Combining Dickensian color and Proustian insight in its depiction of an isolated but determined young woman, it looks forward to Stafford’s celebrated novel The Mountain Lion as well as to the short stories for which she would be awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1970.
About the panelists:
Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels "Rich and Pretty," "That Kind of Mother," and "Leave the World Behind." His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and elsewhere.
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, including "The Silk Road" and "Duplex." A memoir, "Aurelia, Aurélia," is forthcoming this spring. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the writing program at Washington University.
Ann Hulbert is the literary editor of The Atlantic and the author of three books, including "The Interior Castle: The Art and Life of Jean Stafford."