Online: Sean Hewitt on ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE
Join us Tuesday, July 19th at 6:00pm EDT for an Online Book Event through Zoom with Seán Hewitt to celebrate the release of All Down Darkness Wide. Jeremy Atherton Lin, the author of Gay Bar, will join in conversation.
This event is free. Please RSVP through the link below to register. Books are available to preorder now!
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81198158719
By turns devastating and soaring, an ambitious memoir debut from one of Irish literature’s rising stars • A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read
When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis.
All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.
Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty.
Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt’s dauntless footsteps.
Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of J. M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism and the poetry collection Tongues of Fire, which was awarded the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize and a Dalkey Literary Award. He is the recipient of a Northern Writers’ Award, the Resurgence Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Hewitt is a book critic for the Irish Times and teaches modern British and Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin.
Jeremy Atherton Lin is an essayist based in Los Angeles and East Sussex, England. His debut book Gay Bar (2021) received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Jeremy’s work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, Artforum, GQ and The Yale Review, for which he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, Essays and Criticism. His next cultural memoir, Deep House, will be published in 2024.