We're pleased to welcome Andy Kroll to our At Home with Literati Series in support of A Death on W Street. He will be joined in conversation by Sharon Pomerantz.
Click here to join the webinar event on 9/8. No pre-registration required!
Note: we are now hosting on Zoom webinars. You will be prompted to enter a first name and email upon joining. You may then see a window reading "waiting for host to start webinar," but sit tight--you will be admitted as soon as we begin broadcasting live! You will be able to submit questions using the Q&A feature.
Enjoying At Home with Literati? Donate $5 to sustain our programming here.
A true-crime story for the post-truth era
In the early hours of July 10, 2016, gunshots rang out and a young man lay fatally wounded on a quiet Washington, DC, street. But who killed Seth Rich? When he was buried in his hometown, his rabbi declared: “There are no answers for a young man gunned down in the prime of his life.” The rabbi was wrong. There were in fact many answers, way too many.
In the absence of an arrest, a howling mob filled the void. Wild speculation and fantastical theories surfaced on social media and gained traction thanks to a high-level cast of provocateurs. But it wasn’t until Fox News took the rumors from the fringes to the mainstream that Seth Rich’s life and death grew into something altogether unexpected—one of the foundational conspiracy theories of modern times.
A Death on W Street unravels this gripping saga of murder, madness, and political chicanery, one that would ensnare Hillary Clinton and Steve Bannon, a popular pizzeria in northwest DC and the most powerful voices in American media. It's the story of an idealistic twenty-seven-year-old political staffer who became a tragic victim of the culture wars, until his family decided that they had no choice but to defend his name and put an end to the cruel deceptions that surrounded his death.
This is the definitive story of Seth Rich, of those who tried to weaponize his memory in a war of words unlike any other, and of one family’s crusade to protect the truth against all odds.
Andy Kroll is an investigative reporter for ProPublica, where he covers voting, politics, and threats to democracy. He is the former Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone magazine, where he wrote extensively about the Seth Rich case. He has also written for Mother Jones, National Journal, and The California Sunday Magazine. He lives in Washington, DC. This is his first book.
Sharon Pomerantz’s first novel Rich Boy (Twelve, 2010) won the National Jewish Book Award for Debut Fiction and was a Best Book of the Year from Entertainment Weekly and Booklist. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review, as well as on NPR’s Selected Shorts program, and in Best American Short Stories. Her essays, reviews and cultural criticism have appeared in The Forward, The Chicago Tribune, Time, and many others. She has been a fellow at the Macdowell Colony, Art OMI, and the Virginia Center. Before moving to Chicago in 2016, she taught in the writing program at the University of Michigan.
