Nash Jenkins: Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos

Join us at The Book Stall on Wednesday, May 17 at 6:30 pm for an in-store event with author Nash Jenkins as he presents his debut novel, Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos! Mr. Jenkins will be in conversation with editor and author Elizabeth Taylor. Prep meets The Secret History in this searing book about a tragic scandal at an American prep school, told in the form of a literary investigation through a distinctly millennial lens. This event is free with registration. To register, please visit our website.

More About the Book: In 2008, when Foster Dade arrives at Kennedy, an elite boarding school in New Jersey, Barack Obama is beginning his presidency, teenagers share confidences over BBM and iChat, and the internet as we know it is slowly emerging. A transfer student and anxious young man, Foster is stumbling through adolescence in the wake of his parents’ scandalous divorce. But Foster soon finds himself in the company of Annabeth Whittaker and Jack Albright, who take him under their wing to navigate the cliques and politics of the carelessly entitled.

Eighteen months later, Foster will be expelled, following a tragic scandal that leaves Kennedy and its students irreparably changed. When our nameless narrator inherits Foster’s old dorm room, he begins an epic years-long investigation into what exactly happened. Through Foster’s blog posts, playlists, text archives, interviews with former classmates and the narrator’s own obsessive imagination, the story that unfurls asks us who owns our personal narratives, and how we shape ourselves to be the heroes or villains of our own stories.

Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos is about privilege and power, the pitfalls of masculinity, and, most distinctly, how we create the mythologies that give meaning to our lives. With his debut novel, Nash Jenkins brilliantly captures the emotional intensities of adolescence in the dizzying early years of the twenty-first century.

More About the Author: Nash Jenkins grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina, and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 2011. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, he worked as a correspondent for Time in Hong Kong and Washington, D.C.; his cultural commentary has also been published by the Atlantic. He received his MA from the University of Chicago in 2019 and he is currently a Ph.D. student in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern University. Mr. Jenkins lives in Chicago.

About the Conversation Partner: Elizabeth Taylor, chair of multiple Pulitzer Prize juries, is past President of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves on its Board of Directors. Long-time Chicago Tribune Literary and Magazine editor and book reviewer, she is co-editor of The National Book Review with Adam Cohen, her co-author on American Pharaoh: Mayor Richard J. Daley, His Battle for Chicago and the Nation. She is working on a book on Reconstruction-era America.