The Auburn Conference

A Novel

By: Tom Piazza

Narrated by: Mirron Willis

It is 1883, and America is at a crossroads. At a tiny college in upstate New York, an idealistic young professor has managed to convince Mark Twain, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Confederate memoirist Forrest Taylor, and romance novelist Lucy Comstock to participate in the first (and last) Auburn Writers’ Conference for a public discussion about the future of the nation. By turns brilliantly comic and startlingly prescient, The Auburn Conference vibrates with questions as alive and urgent today as they were in 1883—the chronic American conundrums of race, class, and gender, and the fate of the democratic ideal.

©2023 Tom Piazza (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

Narration was terrible, content was interesting.

The narration was awful, the book would have been much more enjoyable with a different reader.

Narration ruins the book

I'm sure Mirron Willis is a lovely person, and I assume he was trying to make the dialogue humorous with his exaggerated voices and accents, but he really didn't do anyone any favors. I definitely don't recommend this audiobook. The narration was so distracting that I can't even tell how I feel about the book itself. I might try to wait a while to get those voices out of my head and then get a print copy from my library and give the book another chance.

Boring

The listen was boring. I didn't want to finish but I had to for my book club.

Very clever! Loved the discourse amongst 19th century American writers.

The greatest writers of 19th century America are brought to life at a writer’s conference organized by a young and naive academic. It’s fun and thought provoking. Enjoyed the narrator’s voices for each character.