Michelle Huneven, author of Bug Hollow, in conversation with J. Courtney Sullivan
When:
Friday, Jun 27, 2025 7:00p -
8:00p
Friday, Jun 27, 2025 7:00p -
8:00p
Where:
Porter Square Books
1815 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02140
Admission:
FREE
Hosted by:
Categories:
Lectures & Conferences
Event website:
https://www.portersquarebooks.com/event/michelle-huneven-author-bug-hollow-conversation-j-courtney-sullivan
Porter Square Books is excited to welcome author Michelle Huneven to celebrate her latest novel, Bug Hollow. Author J. Courtney Sullivan will join Huneven in conversation. This event will take place on Friday, June 27 at 7pm at Porter Square Books (1815 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02140).
Our Cambridge store offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. See parking details below.
To RSVP for this event while we migrate our website to a new platform, please use this link.
*Please note that you will not receive a confirmation email. However, we will send a reminder email one day before the event. Please check your spam folder if you do not see the pre-event email reminder. Better yet, add [email protected] to your safe sender list to avoid PSB event emails going to spam!
ABOUT BUG HOLLOW
A decades-spanning family saga featuring the messy but loving Samuelson clan trying to make sense of the world after the loss of their son Ellis
When Sally Samuelson was eight years old, her golden boy brother Ellis went missing the summer he graduated high school. Ellis finally turned up at the bucolic Bug Hollow, a last gasp of the beautiful Northern California counterculture in the seventies. He had found joy in the communal life there, but died in a freak accident weeks later.
From that point, the world of the Samuelsons never spins on the same axis, especially after Julia, Ellis’s girlfriend from Bug Hollow, shows up pregnant on their doorstep. Each Samuelson has sought their own solace: Sybil Samuelson pours herself into teaching and numbing her pain after the loss of her beloved son; her husband, Phil, had found respite in a love that developed while he was working as an engineer in Saudi Arabia; Katie, the high achieving middle Samuelson, comes home to try and make peace with her mother after a cancer diagnosis. And Sally has become the de facto caretaker to Eva, the child Ellis never knew.
Michelle Huneven is “known for five enthralling novels, which chronicle the lives of middle-class Americans in her lushly conjured native California, as her characters struggle with addiction, excruciating romances, and resounding losses as they continue to seek meaning and a way to be good” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She captures the Samuelson clan with glorious precision and the deepest empathy as they fracture and rebuild again and again.
PRAISE FOR BUG HOLLOW
“Phil and Sibyl Samuelson and their three children are at the center of this deeply satisfying novel, but Huneven's leaps through time and stories provide constant surprise and delights. The reader finds herself in the leafy green of California, then Saudi Arabia for a business trip, then by the side of an old woman who has unexpectedly fallen in love. We go into the cul-de-sacs of these characters' lives, experiencing moments they might not write down in their own biographies, but which shape them forever. Reading the novel feels like watching a master painter at work: color is laid down, forms emerge, and then at the end your breath is taken away, because it has all come together.” —Ann Napolitano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful
“Michelle Huneven’s wondrous and intimate journey of the Samuelson family embedded me with their deepest secrets, greatest loves, epic heartbreaks, and a grief that touched them all for generations. Huneven’s piercing observations of moments big and small left me feeling not just their witness, but more a distant relative emotionally invested in their outcome. I’m going to carry the Samuelsons in my heart for a very long time.” —Griffin Dunne, New York Times bestselling author of The Friday Afternoon Club
“Bug Hollow crackles with compassion and propulsion, offering the layered and propulsive pleasures of the long view—the evolving fortunes and dynamics of a family across decades—without ever surrendering the texture of their days or the pulse of their trippy hearts, their capacity to surprise themselves and us. I inhaled this book in a weekend, grateful to feel it simmering and swirling inside me, regretting only that it would ever end. Michelle Huneven is a treasure, and Bug Hollow gives us the song of her sentences and the glorious telescope of her attention with a whittled, nimble intensity that took my breath away.” —Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michelle Huneven is the author of Round Rock, Jamesland, Blame, Off Course, and Search. Her books have been New York Times Notable Books and finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of a Whiting Award for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a James Beard Award, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She received her master’s in fine arts from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at the University of California, Los Angeles.
J. Courtney Sullivan is the New York Times best-selling author of the novels Commencement, Maine, The Engagements, Saints for All Occasions, and Friends and Strangers. Her work has been translated into seventeen languages. Sullivan's writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, New York, Real Simple, and O, The Oprah Magazine, among many others. In 2017, she wrote the forewords to new editions of two of her favorite classic novels—Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children. Her latest novel is The Cliffs.
PARKING
Porter Square Books: Cambridge Edition offers validated parking in the lot on Roseland St. behind Lesley's University Hall. Roseland Street is accessible by Beacon Street and Mass Ave. When you arrive at the lot, use the screen on the kiosk to get a ticket.
When you're ready to leave, ask for a validation barcode at the cash register. (No purchase necessary.) Parking is free on weekends and weekday evenings from 6PM-7AM. From 7AM-6PM on weekdays the first 45 minutes are free.
Upon exiting the lot, scan your ticket and choose "validation." Then scan the barcode your received from us. If you have an additional charge, you will be prompted to pay after scanning your barcode.
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