Hybrid Event: Culpability, Bruce Holsinger

Date and Time

• Thursday, Jul 10, 2025  7pm - 8pm

Location

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Details

East City Bookshop welcomes Bruce Holsinger to discuss his novel, Culpability, in conversation with Angie Kim.

Note on Format: This hybrid event will have both an in-person component with limited seating as well as a virtual broadcast via Zoom Webinar. Both in-person and virtual attendees will be able to pose questions to the author during audience Q&A.

ABOUT CULPABILITY

From the bestselling author of the "wise and addictive" (New York Times) The Gifted School comes a riveting family drama about moral responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence.

When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat, with his father, Noah, riding shotgun. In the back seat, tweens Alice and Izzy are on their phones, while their mother, Lorelei, a world leader in the field of artificial intelligence, is absorbed in her work. Yet each family member harbors a secret, implicating them each in the accident.

During a weeklong recuperation on the Chesapeake Bay, the family confronts the excruciating moral dilemmas triggered by the crash. Noah tries to hold the family together as a seemingly routine police investigation jeopardizes Charlie’s future. Alice and Izzy turn strangely furtive. And Lorelei’s odd behavior tugs at Noah’s suspicions that there is a darker truth behind the incident—suspicions heightened by the sudden intrusion of Daniel Monet, a tech mogul whose mysterious history with Lorelei hints at betrayal. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenaged daughter, the stakes are raised even higher in this propulsive family drama that is also a fascinating exploration of the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI.

Culpability explores a world newly shaped by chatbots, autonomous cars, drones, and other nonhuman forces in ways that are thrilling, challenging, and unimaginably provocative.

Bruce Holsinger is the author of four novels, including The Displacements and The Gifted School, and many works of nonfiction, most recently On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age (Yale University Press). His books have been recognized with the Colorado Book Award, the John Hurt Fisher Prize, the Philip Brett Award, the John Nicholas Brown Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Prize for a First Book, and others. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications, and he has been profiled on NPR’s Weekend Edition, Here & Now, and Marketplace. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Holsinger teaches in the department of English at the University of Virginia, where he specializes in medieval literature and modern critical thought and serves as editor of the quarterly journal New Literary History. He also teaches craft classes and serves as board chairman for WriterHouse, a local nonprofit in Charlottesville.

Angie Kim is the New York Times bestselling author of Happiness Falls, a Good Morning America book club pick, Virginia Literary Award winner, and Oprah Daily’s #1 novel of 2023. Her debut, Miracle Creek, was an Edgar winner and one of Time’s 100 best mysteries and thrillers of all time. A Korean immigrant who moved to Baltimore in middle school, Kim attended Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Her novels have been translated to over 20 languages and are currently in development for film/TV adaptation.