BABEL: Hernan Diaz
Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz takes the stage to discuss Trust, the bestselling novel Barack Obama called one of his favorites. Diaz blends history, mystery, and money into an electrifying exploration of power and truth. Soon to be an HBO series.
Come be inspired by this acclaimed writer & thinker.
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Trust
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTION
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE
Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth—all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit.
Hernan Diaz’s Trust elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another—and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a novel that spans over a century and becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation.
At once an immersive story and a brilliant literary puzzle, Trust engages the reader in a quest for the truth while confronting the deceptions that often live at the heart of personal relationships, the reality-warping force of capital, and the ease with which power can manipulate facts.
Individual BABEL Tickets
Individual BABEL event tickets include a ticket for in-person attendance to one of the four BABEL events at Kleinhans Music Hall, as well as a virtual link to view from home via Livestream. All tickets will be issued via the Kleinhans/BPO website for the 2025–2026 season.
- General Admission: $48 each
- General Admission with Library Card: $43 each
- VIP Patron: $115 each (includes catered pre-event reception attended by the featured author and reserved seating)
- Student: $15 each (must use a valid .edu email address to purchase, and present a valid Student ID at the event)
- Virtual Only: $35 each
NOTE: Currently, proof of COVID-19 vaccination is not required for entry to BABEL events. We will continue to monitor health & safety recommendations and communicate any changes or updates to ticketholders as necessary. Please note that we are unable to provide refunds for tickets.
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- Click here to purchase VIRTUAL ONLY TICKETS
- Thursday, November 20, 2025
- Expired!
- 7:30 pm
- 3 Symphony Circle, Buffalo, NY 14201
Featured Artist
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Hernan DiazAuthorHERNAN DIAZ is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of two novels published in thirty-seven languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.”
His first novel, In The Distance, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award, and it was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade.
Trust, his second novel, received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a New York Times Bestseller, the winner of the Kirkus Prize, and longlisted for the Booker Prize, among other nominations. It was listed as a best book of the year by over thirty publications and named one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, and TIME magazine, and it was one of The New Yorker’s 12 Essential Reads of the Year. One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2022, Trust is currently being developed as a limited series for HBO, and it has been named one of the New York Times’s Best 100 Books of the 21st Century.
His stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Granta, The Yale Review, Playboy, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere.
He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among others.
He holds a PhD from NYU and is also the author of Borges, between History and Eternity.
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