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Book Launch: Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh

Monday, September 9, 2024

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7:00 pm Eastern

Strand Book Store, 828 Broadway, 3rd Floor, Rare Book Room, New York, New York

Cover image of Bone of the Bone by Sarah Smarsh with photo of author and logos of the Authors Guild Foundation and Strand Book Store

Join us for a launch event with critically acclaimed journalist and author Sarah Smarsh, discussing her new book Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Bone of the Bone here.

Now collected for the first time in one volume, the brilliant and provocative essays that established National Book Award finalist Sarah Smarsh as one of the most important commentators on socioeconomic class in America—featuring a previously unpublished essay and a new introduction.

In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times—class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently. Now, this thought-provoking collection of more than thirty of her highly relevant, previously published essays from the past decade (2013–2024)—ranging from personal narratives to news commentary—demonstrates a life and a career steeped in the issues that affect our collective future.

Compiling Smarsh’s reportage and more poetic reflections, Bone of the Bone is a singular work covering one of the most tumultuous decades in civic life. Timely, filled with perspective-shifting observations, and a pleasure to read, Sarah Smarsh’s essays—on topics as varied as the socioeconomic significance of dentistry, laws criminalizing poverty, fallacies of the “red vs. blue” political framework, working as a Hooters Girl, and much more—are an important addition to any discussion on contemporary America.


This event is part of a collaboration between the Authors Guild Foundation and the Strand Book Store, where we gather writers for conversations that highlight the importance of a rich, diverse literary culture and the authors who contribute to it, and provide a space for writers and readers to connect in-person.

Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for The New York TimesHarper’s MagazineThe Guardian, and many other publications. Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her second book, She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Smarsh is a frequent political commentator and speaker on socioeconomic class. She lives in Kansas.

Photo credit: Doug Stremel