Bestselling author, New Yorker staff writer, and podcast host Malcolm Gladwell comes to Montclair in a pre-festival event for Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival to discuss Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don’t Know.

In his latest book, Gladwell offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers, why they often go wrong, and how we can make those conversations go right. How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to each other that isn’t true? In Talking to Strangers, Gladwell argues that something is very wrong with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world.

Tickets ($45) include a copy of Talking to Strangers. Doors open at 6.15pm. Tickets at the door cost $50.

The VIP admission ($100) includes a post-event cocktail party, priority entry and reserved seating. All tickets are available on Eventbrite here.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers – The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy‘s Top Global Thinkers.

“Talking to Strangers is a must-read…I love this book… Reading it will actually change not just how you see strangers, but how you look at yourself, the news–the world…Reading this book changed me.”―Oprah Winfrey, O, The Oprah Magazine

This event is a fundraiser for Montclair-based non-profit Succeed2gether, which offers after-school one-on-one tutoring and enrichment classes with the aim of closing the education opportunity gap in Essex County.

The fourth annual Montclair Literary Festival will take place March 25 to 29, 2020. Please visit succeed2gether.org/montclair-literary-festival/ for more details of the program, which will feature more than 100 authors. The festival organizing committee wishes to thank event partners Succeed2gether staff, First Congregational Church, and Watchung Booksellers, and festival sponsors Rao’s, Montclair State University, West of Hudson Realty Group, and community members.