Author Talk: Jessica M. Goldstein — Retro - with Alexandra Petri

Author Jessica M. Goldstein discusses their book "Retro" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

An out-of-work actress gets a job as a tour guide for an ultra-luxury time travel company—only to discover her trips to the past could upend her present—in this sharp, speculative debut novel.

Jessica M. Goldstein is a journalist and humorist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Vulture, Marie Claire, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and more. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she was born and raised in New Jersey and currently lives in Washington, D.C. Retro is her first novel.

Goldstein is in conversation with Alexandra Petri, a staff writer at The Atlantic. Before joining The Atlantic in 2025, she wrote a humor column for the Washington Post. She won the 2025 Thurber Prize for American Humor for her book AP’s US History: Important American Documents (I Made Up). She is the author of two other books, Nothing Is Wrong and Here Is Why: Essays, and A Field Guide to Awkward Silences. Her writing has also appeared in McSweeney’s, the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts and Murmurs, and elsewhere.

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