About This event

Come to the book party and reading of Alistair McCartney’s new novel The Disintegrations (University of Wisconsin Press). “I know nothing about death, absolutely nothing,” asserts the narrator of this inventive autobiographical novel. Yet he can’t stop thinking about it. Detached from life in Los Angeles and his past in Australia, uncomfortable around other humans, he researches death on the Internet; mulls over distant and intimate stories of suicides, serial killers, and “natural deaths”; and wanders about LA’s Holy Cross Cemetery. He’s looking for answers, all the while formulating his own disquieting philosophies.  Wry yet somber, astringent yet tender, The Disintegrations confronts both the impossibility of understanding death and the timeless longing for immortality.