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Lunch for Libraries is sold out for individual tickets. To put your name on the waitlist, please email Francesca Rodriquez frodriquez@mplfoundation.org. We will know more about available tickets on April 1st. If you are a guest of a table captain, you may continue to purchase your ticket online. 

Madison Public Library Foundation's annual Lunch for Libraries fundraiser is an opportunity for community members who are committed to our libraries to come together and celebrate, support and invest in the future of our libraries.

This year's lunch will feature the Pulitzer Prize winning bestselling author of Empire Falls, Richard Russo. Russo will join us on Tuesday, April 18 at the Overture Center for the Arts to discuss his newest novel, Everybody's Fool. Tickets include lunch and a signed copy of Everybody's Fool.

Russo is the author of seven previous novels; two collections of stories; and Elsewhere, a memoir. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which like Nobody’s Fool was adapted to film, in a multiple-award-winning HBO miniseries.

In Everybody's Fool, Russo returns to North Bath—“a town where dishonesty abounds, everyone misapprehends everyone else and half the citizens are half-crazy” (The New York Times)—and the characters who made Nobody’s Fool a beloved choice of book clubs everywhere. Everybody’s Fool is classic Russo, filled with humor, heart, hard times, and people you can’t help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so human.

All proceeds of Lunch for Libraries will benefit the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Madison Public Library system. For their over 2.3 million yearly visitors, these libraries provide access to thousands of books, activities, meeting spaces, educational classes, and more in a public space where everyone is welcome.