Culpability with Bruce Holsinger

We're happy to welcome Bruce back to the store! He'll be talking with Rachel Beanland about his newest novel.

About the Book:
When the Cassidy-Shaws’ autonomous minivan collides with an oncoming car, killing an elderly couple, 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 all in the tragic 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.

About the Author:
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.

Rachel Beanland is the author of two novels, The House Is On Fire (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Florence Adler Swims Forever (Simon & Schuster, 2020). Beanland attended the University of South Carolina and earned her MFA in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has taught at the College of William & Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of Richmond, where she was the 2023-24 Writer-in-Residence. Beanland lives in Richmond, Virginia with her family.