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Nate DiMeo - The Memory Palace

  • Solid State Books 600 H Street Northeast Washington, DC, 20002 United States (map)

Help us celebrate the publication of The Memory Palace, a fantastic new book from the podcast of the same name.

Save a seat, and/or a book! Register here!

Join us in welcoming creator, producer, and now author Nate DiMeo, as he discusses his new book, The Memory Palace, a wondrous debut from the creator of the award-winning podcast of same name. Nate will be joined in conversation by author Rachel Louise Snyder

This in person event will be held at Solid State Books on H Street, so mark your calendars! Tickets HERE!

Incredible true stories find strange, new magic in American history in this wondrous first book from the creator of the award-winning podcast The Memory Palace.

The Memory Palace is a collection of tiny, crystalline historical tales that read like luminous short fiction, and, like Nate DiMeo’s acclaimed podcast of the same name, conjure lost moments and forgotten figures who are calling out across time to be remembered.

Space capsules filled with fruit flies and future Senators. A socialite scientist who gave up her glamorous life to follow love and the elusive prairie chicken. A boy genius on a path to change the world who got lost in the theoretical possibilities of streetcar transfers. An enslaved man who stole a boat and charted a course that led him to freedom, to war, and to Congress. A farmer’s wife who put down her butter churn, picked up the butter, and became an international art star. An amusement park glowing at the water’s edge when electric lights were a brand-new thing. This cabinet of curiosities teems with wonder.

For fifteen years, Nate DiMeo has turned to the past to make sense of the way we live today, finding beauty and meaning in history’s dustier corners, holding things up to the light and weaving facts, keen insight, wit and poignant observation into unforgettable tales. With new stories and treasured favorites from the beloved podcast assembled alongside dynamic illustrations and archival photographs for the first time, enchantment awaits you in The Memory Palace.

Nate DiMeo is the creator, producer, and host of The Memory Palace, a podcast from Radiotopia and PRX. He was previously the artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and has performed stories from The Memory Palace in theaters all over the United States, as well as Canada, England, Ireland, and in a field at a rock festival in Tasmania. He has reported stories for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and All Things Consider and American Public Media’s Marketplace, as well as numerous other public radio programs. He is the co-author of Pawnee: The Greatest Town in America, for which he was a finalist for the Thurber Prize in American Humor. He has written for NBC’s Parks and Recreation and the ABC miniseries, The Astronaut Wives’ Club. He lives in Los Angeles by way of Providence, Rhode Island.

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of Fugitive Denim, the novel What We’ve Lost is Nothing, and No Visible Bruises, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year, winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award, the Hillman Prize, and the Helen Bernstein Book Award, and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, LA Times Book Prize, and Kirkus Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, Snyder is a Professor of Creative Writing and Journalism at American University. She lives in Washington, DC.

Earlier Event: December 4
Reading the City: Holiday Book Swap
Later Event: December 8
Retellings Book Club: Toto