We're so excited to have Erik Dussere and David Keplinger in conversation for the release of Erik's book The West House! This event will be held digitally via Crowdcast and will be free, but you must RSVP to receive the login link and password for our Crowdcast event. Please note the link and password will be in your confirmation email!

When Kese, just out of college, starts his summer job in a small New England town, he finds himself trying to unravel a mystery. Charlotte West, rich and imperious, has been baffling the locals since she arrived in the town more than twenty years ago. Does she have a dark past—or is she just an excuse for Kese to indulge an obsession, or to avoid the encroaching boredom of his days? His investigation takes him back through the history of the town and of America itself, with its borders of class and race and bloodline.

A work of literary fiction with an American mystery at its center, The West House is about the traumatic pasts that haunt the book’s characters, and about the stories that it is possible for us to tell about those pasts, those hauntings.

Erik Dussere teaches classes in literature and film at American University in Washington, DC. He has published two books of criticism: Balancing the Books (a study of the way that Toni Morrison and William Faulkner deal with the history of slavery) and America Is Elsewhere (which looks at the tradition of noir in post-WWII film and fiction). The West House is his first novel.

David Keplinger is the author of six books of poetry, recently Another City (Milkweed Editions, 2018) which was awarded the 2019 UNT Rilke Prize. In 2020 he won the Emily Dickinson Award from The Poetry Society of America. For his work in collaboration with Danish poet Carsten René Nielsen, Forty-One Objects, he is currently a finalist for the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translator's Association.

Please note Loyalty has a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during this virtual event.

Erik Dussere and David Keplinger for THE WEST HOUSE