For decades, tradition-minded writers have complained about the ugliness of contemporary art. The books of the Center’s “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” Initiative answer it the only way that finally works — by making better art.
A Novel · Post Hill Press
A comic novel of modern Washington in the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Christopher Buckley.
A Novel
A young-adult novel set in rural upstate New York during the height of the opioid epidemic.
A Comic Tale of Life, Death and Atheism
A top-ten bestseller in 2010 that premiered as a stage play at the Catholic University of America in 2017.
The Making of a Cultural Conservative
An intellectual and political memoir — from rural upstate New York to the corridors of American power.
A comic novel in the literary tradition of Tom Wolfe and Christopher Buckley, The Washington Zoo is a tour d’horizon of modern Washington, D.C. — from its toniest schools, political corridors, and social competitions to the domestic help, underclass, and underworld that also undergird society in the nation’s capital.
Its social insights are the result, in part, of thirty years of living and raising children in the nation’s capital, and of the author’s characteristic desire to capture in prose some of the truths of the way modern Americans have come to live, for better and worse. Forthcoming from Post Hill Press, Spring 2027.
Forthcoming. A young adult novel grounded in Eberstadt’s home territory — rural, blue-collar, upstate New York. Set in the 1990s, during the height of the opioid epidemic and under the strains of the Rust Belt, Trailer Boy is told through the eyes of a precocious ten-year-old.
At a time when mainstream fiction is dominated by identity politics and victimhood, this book — realist in style and devoid of sentimentality — flips the cultural script. Authentic, dark, and comedic, its themes reach far beyond the particularities of its time and place to sound universal notes about turn-of-the-century America from the perspective of its most forgotten citizens.
Key to its storytelling are themes of redemption, fallenness and grace, and one of the least explored and most critical moral restorations of our time: the protectiveness and love that endures for one’s own despite the post-1960s disruption and destruction of family. Entertaining and never didactic, Trailer Boy is a redemptive tale for an age that has largely turned its back on redemption.
A counter-cultural epistolary novella and a top-ten Ignatius Press bestseller in 2010, The Loser Letters premiered as a stage play at the Catholic University of America in 2017.
Told through a series of letters from a young convert to atheism addressed to the movement’s leading thinkers, the book turns the arguments of the new atheists back on themselves — comic in tone, serious in intent, and a demonstration that the answer to a hostile culture is better art rather than louder complaint.
An intellectual and political memoir capturing the story of the author’s journey from childhood in rural upstate New York to the Ivy League, the halls of intellectual life, and the corridors of American power — including government service at the United Nations and the U.S. State Department as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration.
This personal story is interwoven with the seminal events of the era — Vietnam, the hostage crisis in Iran, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, and the culture wars on the home front. Written for a general audience, it is both a contribution to contemporary intellectual history and a reflection on what it means to be an outlier firmly grounded in tradition.
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