Columbus: Harper's Magazine Presents Anne Fadiman

Event date: 
11/26/2018 - 7:00pm

Please join Book Culture on Columbus and Harper's Magazine on Monday, November 26th at 7pm for an event with Anne Fadiman, interviewed by Rick MacArthur. 

In The Wine Lover’s Daughter, Anne Fadiman examines--with all her characteristic wit and feeling--her relationship with her father, Clifton Fadiman, a renowned literary critic, editor, and radio host whose greatest love was wine.

An appreciation of wine--along with a plummy upper-crust accent, expensive suits, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Western literature--was an essential element of Clifton Fadiman’s escape from lower-middle-class Brooklyn to swanky Manhattan. But wine was not just a class-vaulting accessory; it was an object of ardent desire. The Wine Lover’s Daughter traces the arc of a man’s infatuation from the glass of cheap Graves he drank in Paris in 1927; through the Château Lafite-Rothschild 1904 he drank to celebrate his eightieth birthday, when he and the bottle were exactly the same age; to the wines that sustained him in his last years, when he was blind but still buoyed, as always, by hedonism.

Wine is the spine of this touching memoir; the life and character of Fadiman’s father, along with her relationship with him and her own less ardent relationship with wine, are the flesh. The Wine Lover’s Daughter is a poignant exploration of love, ambition, class, family, and the pleasures of the palate by one of our finest essayists.


Anne Fadiman is the author of The Wine Lover's Daughter, a memoir about her father (FSG, 2017). Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (FSG, 1997), won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Salon Book Award. Fadiman has also written two essay collections, At Large and At Small and Ex Libris, and is the editor of Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love (all published by FSG). She is the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.

John R. (Rick) MacArthur is president and publisher of Harper’s Magazine and an award-winning journalist and author. He writes regularly for The Spectator (U.K.). Le Monde Diplomatique, and writes a column in French, for Montreal’s Le Devoir newspaper. In 2017 he was named a Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters, an honor bestowed by the French government. His first book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, was a New York Times notable book. His second book, The Selling of “Free Trade”: NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy, was published in 2000. He has also written You Can’t Be President, published in 2008 and reissued in 2012 as The Outrageous Barriers to Democracy in America. His fourth book, L'Illusion Obama, was published in France and Quebec in 2012. 

Event address: 
Book Culture on Columbus
450 Columbus Ave
New York, NY 10024
The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir By Anne Fadiman Cover Image
$16.00
ISBN: 9780374537944
Availability: On hand at one or more locations, see product page for details
Published: Farrar, Straus and Giroux - November 13th, 2018