112th: Words Without Borders
Join Book Culture on 112th Street, the Pessoa Festival and Words Without Borders on Friday, November 16th for two special events! We will be welcoming Isabel Lucas, author of Journey to the Heart of the American Dream at 6pm and John Keene, translator of Hilda Hilst's Letters from a Seducer and author of Counternarratives at 7pm.
6:00pm:
A Literary Guide to Trump’s America: Isabel Lucas’s Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
Portuguese journalist Isabel Lucas has interviewed some of literature’s biggest names: Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Mendelsohn, Salman Rushdie, Chimimanda Ngozi Adiche. In Journey to the Heart of the American Dream: America by the Book—a multi-genre book combining literary criticism and reportage—she turns her attention to Donald Trump’s America and what American literary greats like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others can tell us about the rise of America’s 45th president. Moderated by Eric M. B. Becker ofWords Without Borders.
7:00pm:
Letters from a Seducer: John Keene on translating Brazilian great Hilda Hilst and the influence of Brazil on his own work
Newly-minted MacArthur Genius John Keene discusses his work translating Hilda Hilst, to whom the 2018 Pessoa Festival pays tribute. Hilst’s Letters from a Seducer is a work which describes the everyday life of Karl, a wealthy, erudite, and amoral man who seeks an answer to his incomprehension of life through sex. Karl writes and sends twenty provocative letters to Cordelia, his chaste sister. The letters’ text becomes intertwined with the life of the poet Stamatius, who finds Karl’s letters in the trash. Moderated by Anderson Tepper of Vanity Fair.
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