His book is blanketing the airwaves!
New York City’s public radio station, WNYC, has chosen the bestselling new novel of Hunter MFA Creative Writing Program Director Adam Haslett as the featured work for March of its monthly book club.
Mothers and Sons (Hachette, 2025) is WNYC’s pick for Get Lit with All Of It, a monthly on-air, social-media, in-person and live-stream book club hosted by Alison Stewart and partnered with The New York Public Library.
Haslett will read from and discuss the national bestseller at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute on March 3 as part of Hunter’s Distinguished Writers Series and live for an event broadcast by WNYC in early April.
“Get Lit is a great series that brings together so many New Yorkers, and I’m honored to have my book chosen for it,” Haslett said.
The novel is the story of Peter, a New York asylum lawyer caught up in the lives of his clients, and his estranged mother, Ann, a former minister who now runs a women’s spiritual center in Vermont. The book moves between the immigration courts of Manhattan and this rural retreat, offering a window into these two very different worlds as well as the parallels in the psychic lives of the people who work within them.
The Washington Post said the book, “could not be more timely,” and called Haslett, “one of the most psychologically astute fiction writers in America,” while The Guardian says, “The echoes of the Russian greats in the title aren’t misplaced – this is an epic family saga that packs an extraordinary emotional punch.” The Boston Globe, meanwhile, called the book “masterful,” and said, “Haslett’s storytelling skill is on quietly magnificent display.”
Haslett is the author of Imagine Me Gone, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize.
His books have been translated into 30 languages, and his journalism on culture and politics has appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He has received the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Winship Award, and the Strauss Living Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.