Thalia Book Club: Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists

The nimble and funny novelist discusses his unputdownable book with Sree Sreenivasan (Dean of Students Columbia Journalism School). 

"In his zinger of a debut, Rachman deftly applies his experience as a foreign correspondent and editor to chart the goings-on at a scrappy English language newspaper in Rome.  Chapters read like exquisite short stories." - Publishers Weekly. 

"This book is so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off. . . . hilarious and heart-wrenching." - Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review

Download this program from Audible.com

Performance playlist:

Reading
David Furr

Conversation
Tom Rachman and Sree Sreenivasan

A Discussion with the Audience

David Furr is currently playing “Jack Worthing” in The Importance of Being Earnest on Broadway. His other Broadway credits include Accent on Youth, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Cymbeline, King Lear with Christopher Plummer, as well as the national tours of The Rivals and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? He appeared off Broadway in Equivocation at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Furr has also appeared extensively at leading regional theatres around the country including Lincoln Center, The McCarter, The Old Globe, Long Wharf, Denver Theatre Center, and many others. He received Ovation and Henry Award nominations for his performance in Arthur Miller’s All My Sons.

Tom Rachman was born in London and raised in Vancouver. A graduate of the University of Toronto and the Columbia School of Journalism, he has been a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Rome, and worked as an editor at the International Herald Tribune in Paris. The Imperfectionists is his debut novel. He currently lives in Rome and is working on his second novel.

Sree Sreenivasan is a professor and dean of students’ affairs at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches in the digital media program, including media entrepreneurship. A former TV technology reporter on WABC and WNBC, he is now a contributing editor at DNAinfo.com, a Manhattan-news startup he helped launch in 2009 with Joe Ricketts. He is co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association. In 2009, he was named one of AdAge’s 25 media people to follow on Twitter and in 2010 was named one of 20 journalists to follow by the Society of Professional Journalists and one of the 35 most influential people in social media by Poynter.org.