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Author Talk - Up with the Sun with Thomas Mallon

An evening with Thomas Mallon and Jamie Kirchick for Mallon's new book Up with the Sun

To wrap up Pride month, join the Library and Little District Books as we host DC's own Thomas Mallon for his new novel Up With the Sun. Joined by Jamie Kirchick, author of Secret City, Mallon will discuss his new historical fiction telling of the rise and fall of Broadway actor Dick Kallman. 

Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing. 

About the Book

Dick Kallman was an up-and-coming actor—until he wasn’t. From co-starring in Broadway shows, to becoming part of Lucille Ball’s historic Desilu workshop, and then finally landing his own short-lived primetime TV series, Dick’s star was clearly on the rise. But his roles began to dry up and he faded from the spotlight - until his sensational murder in 1980. Told from the perspective of Matt Liannetto, Dick’s occasional pianist and longtime acquaintance, we see the full story of Dick’s life and death. Liannetto is a talented journeyman pianist, often on the fringes of Broadway history’s most important moments. He’s also a gay man who grew up in an era when that sort of information was closely held, and he struggles with accepting the rapid changes happening in the world around him.

Up With The Sun takes readers on a journey that spans more than thirty years, from the studio lots and rehearsal sets of the 1950s to the seedy streets of 1970s Manhattan. It is a busy, bustling world, peopled by a captivating cast of characters all clamoring for a sliver of the limelight. Readers will bump elbows with Sophie Tucker and gossip about Rock Hudson during intermission at Judy Garland’s comeback show. Newsweek has called Mallon a "master of the historical novel," and here he proves himself a veteran of the genre, doing what he does best: conjuring figures from history who feel real enough to walk right off the page. This is a crime story, a showbiz story, a love story, and a deeply moving story about a series of pivotal moments in the history of gay life in the post-war era.

About the Author

Thomas Mallon is a novelist, critic and director of the creative writing program at The George Washington University.
He attended Brown University as an undergraduate and earned a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He received the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1994 and won a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1987. Mallon taught English at Vassar College from 1979-1991. Mallon is the author of the novels Henry and Clara, Two Moons, Dewey Defeats Truman, Aurora 7, Bandbox, and most recently Fellow Travelers; as well as writing four works of nonfiction. He is a former literary editor of GQ, where he wrote the "Doubting Thomas" column for ten years, and has contributed frequently to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and Harper's. He was appointed a member of the National Council on the Humanities in 2002 and became Director of Preservation and Access of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2004. He then served as Deputy Chairman of the NEH.

About the Conversation Partner

James Kirchick is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and author of the instant New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. A widely published journalist and historian, he has reported from over 40 countries, and his reportage, essays, and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times,  the Atlantic, the New York Review of Books, New York, Rolling Stone, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Die Welt, the Spectator, and the Times Literary Supplement, among many other publications in the United States and around the world. His first book, The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues and the Coming Dark Age was published by Yale University Press in 2017.

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