LOCAL>> Steve Kettmann, Mary C. Curtis, and Anthony Scaramucci - Now What? (Virtual Event)

When the networks called the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden on November 7, 2020, people from coast to coast exhaled.

This quick-turnaround volume, a collection of 38 essays from writers all over the country—”many of America’s most thoughtful voices,” as Jon Meacham puts it—captures the week Trump was voted out and helps point toward a way forward to a nation less divided.

In Now What?, an eclectic lineup of contributors—from Rosanna Arquette, Susan Bro, and General Wesley Clark to Keith Olbermann, Stewart O’Nan, and Anthony Scaramucci—puts a year of transition into perspective, and summons the anxieties and hopes so many have for better times ahead.

As award-winning columnist Mary C. Curtis writes in the lead essay, “Saying you’re not interested in politics is dangerous because, like it or not, politics is interested in you.”

Novelist Christopher Buckley, a former speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, laments, “The Republican Senate, with one exception, has become a stay of ovine, lickspittle quislings, degenerate descendants of such giants as Everett Dirksen, Barry Goldwater, Howard Baker and John McCain.”

As publisher Steve Kettmann writes in the Introduction: “The hope is that in putting out these glimpses so quickly, giving them an immediacy unusual in book publishing, we can help in the mourning for all that has been lost, help in the healing (of ourselves and of our country), and help in the pained effort, like moving limbs that have gone numb from inactivity, to give new life to our democracy. We stared into the abyss, tottered on the edge, and a record-setting surge of voting and activism delivered us from the very real threat of plunging into autocracy.”