Harry Bennett Branch Local Author Series: An Evening with Daniel Asa Rose, Author of Truth or Consequences

Daniel Asa Rose will discuss his memoir Truth or Consequences: Improbable Adventures, a Near-Death Experience, and Unexpected Redemption in the New Mexico Desert, a tale of his travels from Connecticut to New Mexico with his lifelong friend Tony Wilson to understand the complexities of his life choices.

A Q&A will follow the presentation.

Registration required.

Rose was a successful novelist, memoirist, book critic and columnist for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire and other publications when his domestic life imploded. His wife of 16 years wanted out of the marriage. Before he could slip into depression, doubt and self-loathing, Wilson made an irresistible proposition: Go back to the place where, 40 years earlier, their college road trip had come to a crashing halt when their car was T-boned in the decidedly oddball town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

In Truth or Consequences, Rose and Wilson return to the scene of the crash in an effort to make sense of that fateful moment. Rose is certain that if he can locate the other driver in whose arms he almost died, he will find the self he lost and make peace with his life choices. Rose moves into a single-wide trailer four blocks from the crash site. Over the next eight months, inexplicable encounters make him fall in love with the New Mexico desert and the wiggy place that embraces him.

Daniel Asa Rose is the recipient of an O. Henry Prize and two PEN America Literary Awards for his fictional stories in his first collection, Small Family with Rooster. His first novel, Flipping for It, a black comedy about divorce, was a New York Times New and Noteworthy paperback. Rose is also the author of Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust. His most recent book is Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China with My Black Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant–and Save His Life, which was named one of the Top Books of the Year by Publisher’s Weekly. Rose was born and continues to live in Connecticut.