Fall for the Book Minifest: Boys, Interrupted

Thursday, February 19, 2026 10:30 AM EST
Fenwick Library, Fenwick Reading Room

A coming-of-age tale of male friendship and loneliness, the novel Great Disasters by Grady Chambers follows six young men from their Chicago high school years in the early 2000s through war, love, and heartbreak. Slipping between memories and adulthood, Chambers explores humor, hope, addiction, loss and more in this portrait of friends moving forward together and apart. Chicago Review of Books calls it “Tender and taut in its elegiac prose, Grady Chambers’s debut Great Disasters perfectly captures the surreal and frightening culture of the day, making Great Disasters a remarkable retrospective on the War on Terror era and the ways in which it ensnared and destroyed a generation.”