The Lake Placid Institute, in partnership with LPCA, presents the John C. Bogle Adirondack Roundtables
At Cambria Hotel Lake Placid
2127 Saranac Ave
Breakfast provided at 8:30 am. Roundtable begins at 9 am.
The Mountains as Muse: Fictionalizing the Adirondacks
Author Christopher Shaw discusses the creative process of taking a real place and its reality and turning it into fiction, followed by a reading from his 2025 book, The Manager:
The Manager: A Tale of the Cold War
Lake Placid, 1982: Backcountry editor Walter Loving picks up a top-coated stranger hitchhiking in the snow outside the Casa del Sol restaurant. It is two years after the Soviet Union’s loss to the U.S. in the “Miracle On Ice” Winter Olympic hockey game. The hitchhiker lights a French cigarette and tells Walter he is the “manager” of a visiting Red Army B-team, whose players have kicked him out of the van in the snow.
But the manager is really a spy obsessed with restoring Soviet dominance in ice sports. His lover is a spectacular Olympic figure skater fond of quoting the poet Anna Akhmatova. Together they invade and complicate Walt’s life in ways that test his reserves of courage and resourcefulness, with far reaching effects.
The Manager isn’t a typical spy novel, though lines are crossed at great risk and stakes are high. It is above all a novel of the Adirondacks, a novel of relationships, and of love and its varieties.
It is also a novel of the environment. Aging radicals and Indigenous activists fight massive hydro development and a pipeline, with scenes in Siberia, Montreal, northern Quebec, Sarajevo.
The Manager is funny, irreverent, satirical, earthy, with bad behaviors and common profanities, persistent terrible decision making, unethical journalism, the common sadnesses of illness, death, failure, loss, and change.
“I loved it. Abbey meets Vonnegut” – Bill McKibben
“The Manager is Shaw at his best. Fast-paced with dramatic twists and turns that keep you hooked to the very end, the story is a rich tapestry of fact, fancy, and colorful characters that is woven so artfully and convincingly into the Olympic region of the Adirondacks that locals will feel right at home in it. You will love this book; enjoy the ride!” – Dr. Curt Stager, Still Waters, Your Atomic Self
“And I thought Chris Shaw’s The Power Line was nervy! For confidence and range, Shaw’s new caper, The Manager, strides from the Adirondacks to Montreal, Bosnia, and Innu territory in Quebec. But always the needle swings resolutely home to Lake Placid and Shaw’s beloved Adirondacks. The Manager‘s feisty mavericks might just be doing for the Adirondacks what John D. MacDonald did for Florida with his great Travis McGee series – giving it a sound, a beat, a social culture all its own.” – Amy Godine, The Black Woods
Copies of The Manager will be available for purchase ($23.95). Cash, check and credit card accepted.
Christopher Shaw
Author/Historian
The Manager is Christopher Shaw’s third Adirondacks book since his previous novel, The Power Line, came out in 2020. He is a former editor of Adirondack Life, and the author of Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip with the Gods (W.W. Norton, 2000), and The Crazy Wisdom: Memoir of a Friendship. He taught writing at Middlebury College for twenty years.