“The Naming Song”: A Reading and Conversation with Jedediah Berry
Join the Tewksbury Public Library and the Chelmsford Public Library for an evening with Jedediah Berry, author of The Naming Song, winner of the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction. Berry will read from his award-winning novel and discuss its imaginative landscape, before opening the floor to an audience Q&A. Attendees may participate either in person or online.
The Naming Song is a wildly imaginative speculative novel that explores the power and politics of language through the story of an unnamed courier working for an authoritarian Naming Committee. New words become tools of control, and resistance brews among silent radicals and forgotten ghosts in a society where naming is both salvation and erasure. The Naming Song is a thrilling, thought-provoking adventure that fully embraces the beauty and power of what cannot be Named.
This program is sponsored by the Mass Book Awards Speakers Bureau and is presented in collaboration with the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
JEDEDIAH BERRY is the author of The Naming Song, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for fiction and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. His first novel, The Manual of Detection, won the Crawford Award and the Hammett Prize, and was adapted for broadcast by BBC Radio 4. Together with his partner, writer Emily Houk, he runs Ninepin Press, an independent publisher of fiction, poetry, and games in unusual shapes. He lives in Western Massachusetts.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3482487-0
