Cal Hoffman in conversation with Penelope Ann Miller, "Judah Can't Tell"

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The secret you kept as a child to protect an adult is the one that follows you longest. You learn early how to manage a room, and then you are forty and still doing it without noticing. Hoffman's novel sits inside a boy holding something he has decided nobody can be told, and it gets the arithmetic of that right - the small lies required to keep the big one standing. Miller joins him in conversation, which is a genuinely odd and good pairing: she has spent a career playing people with something withheld, from Carlito's Way to The Artist, and she reads a scene differently than a critic would. Wednesday evening on the Strip, free, RSVP requested, in a store that has been selling books to people who work in the industry since 1975 and treats a first novel with the same seriousness as a memoir by somebody famous. The staff recommendation cards here are handwritten and worth reading on their own. Thirty chairs between the shelves and no microphone worth speaking of, so sit close.