Author Event! Cynthia Weiner's "A Gorgeous Excitement"

Cynthia Weiner comes to Symposium Books to discuss her new novel, "A Gorgeous Excitement"!

Join us on May 7th at 6pm as we host Cynthia Weiner in conversation with Courtney Denelle to discuss her new novel, A Gorgeous Excitement. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase!

About the Book:

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, Kirkus Reviews, CrimeReads

There are two things Nina Jacobs is determined to do over the summer of 1986: avoid her mother’s depression-fueled rages, and lose her virginity before she starts college in the fall. Both are seemingly impossible—when her mother isn’t lying in bed for days, she’s lashing out at Nina over any perceived slight. And after a blowjob gone spectacularly wrong, Nina is the talk of Flanagan’s, the Upper East Side bar where young Manhattan society congregates. It doesn’t help that she’s Jewish, an outsider among the blue-eyed blondes who populate this rarified world. She can fit in, kind of, with enough alcohol and prescription drugs stolen from her parents’ medicine cabinet.

Flanagan’s is where she pines for the handsome, preppy, and charismatic Gardner Reed. Every girl wants to sleep with him and every guy wants to be him. After she’s introduced to cocaine, Nina plunges headlong into her pursuit of Gardner, oblivious to the warning signs. When a new medication seemingly frees her mother from darkness, and Nina and Gardner grow closer, it seems like Nina might finally get what she wants. But at what cost?

Freud called cocaine “a gorgeous excitement,” but a gorgeous excitement for the wrong guy can be lethal.

About the Author:

Cynthia Weiner has had a long career writing and teaching fiction. Her short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Sun, and Epiphany, and her story “Boyfriends” was awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is also the assistant director of The Writers Studio in New York City.

A Gorgeous Excitement, her first novel, was inspired by her upbringing on New York’s Upper East Side in the 1980s, and particularly by the notorious “Preppy Murder” of 1986. The novel was named a Best Book of 2025 by the New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, and Oprah Daily.

Weiner now lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

About the Moderator:

Courtney Denelle is the author of IT’S NOT NOTHING (SFWP, 2022), a novel-in-fragments drawn from her experience of homelessness and recovery, and the forthcoming novel Real Piece of Work, an artworld satire that explores image-craft and the unbidden toll of a life lived in persona. Her stories have appeared in the Alembic, Tahoma Literary Review, Southampton Review, and elsewhere, and have been anthologized in America’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction and Night of the Geminids: Fireside Tales. She lives in Providence, where she received her greater education from the public library.