Dispatch 16: Chris Cander and The Weight of a Piano make a final tour stop in Chicago

March 21, 2019, by

Houston author Chris Cander’s “Dispatches from Book Tour,” a multi-week blog series of reflections and updates along her 17-city U.S. book tour for her new novel The Weight of a Piano (published by Knopf), comes to a close with Dispatch 16, from Chicago.

Friday, March 15, 2019

I blew into the windy city for the final official stop on my book tour. Before my event, I asked my Uber driver to take me to the Brewster Apartments, which was the building I fictionalized in my novel 11 Stories. I took along the miniature piano I photographed in Death Valley while I was writing The Weight of a Piano, and held it up right about where my protagonist Roscoe fell from the roof of the building in the novel. (Roscoe, meet Mini #Blüthner; Mini Blüthner, meet Roscoe.) 

The National Book Award finalist, Rebecca Makkai, whose work I’ve long admired, invited me to be in conversation with her at Women & Children First Bookstore. Her interview format was so much fun; it felt like a continuation of our hilarious dinner conversation beforehand, but with some audience participation thrown in. It was a delightful ending to my nearly 8 weeks of traveling.

I’m so grateful to all the bookstores and booksellers and readers and reviewers who’ve helped contribute to this novel’s success since its release. Thank you, dear readers, for sharing this journey with me, and Inprint, for graciously posting these dispatches. I’ll always look back on this time with gratitude and love.

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