Fairfield, CT - Author Peter Coviello will present his newly published memoir, Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs on Thursday, June 21, 2017 from 7:00pm-8:00pm at the Fairfield University Bookstore 2nd floor, 1499 Post Road, Fairfield, CT 06824, 203-255-7756. Born and raised in Fairfield, he is Professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago, and is currently on fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton.
Scored with warmth and humor, Long Players considers grief and the things that keep us alive—namely: sex, talk, and dancing. Coviello has written a book for anyone who has ever loved a record like their life depended on it. Copies of Long Players will be available for purchase/signing at the downtown Bookstore event.
“This is Pete.”
When Lucy and Amelia—at the time, brand-new teenagers—introduce Peter Coviello to their friends, that’s all that needs to be said. While dating their mother, he was “Pete,” while engaged to her, their “semi-stepdad,” before finally becoming, officially, their stepfather. But after the marriage suddenly ended, what was he to these two girls? There isn’t really a word for an ex-stepfather, so “Pete” will have to do.
A story of heartbreak, stepparenthood, and the limitless grace of pop songs, Long Players: A Love Story in Eighteen Songs (A Penguin Books Original; On Sale June 5, 2018; $16.00) is a memoir about our many interwoven ways of falling in love: with books, bands and records, with friends and lovers, and with the families we make.
We follow Coviello through his happy marriage, his unforeseen divorce, and his fumbling postmarital forays into sex and romance. We travel, from Maine to New York to Chicago, from Madrid to Paris to Naples, as he is dogged by a hard-to-ask question: What kind of parent is the person who was married to the mother of two little girls—Lucy and Amelia, the bright-souled kids at the center of Long Players and then, one day, wasn't? How do these three go on improvising a sort of world for one another? In the teeth of so much heartbreak, uncertainty and grown-up sorrow, how do they reinvent the love that held them together? And why does it seem so often that, whatever new form that love will take, songs will be at the center?
Peter Coviello has written written about Walt Whitman, Steely Dan, Mormon polygamy, the history of sexuality, American literature, stepparenthood, Prince, and much besides, in work that has appeared in venues like The Believer, Raritan, Frieze, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, as well as in several books.
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