48-51 Broad Street
For twenty years New York Review Books Classics have been devoted to two causes: discovering important, previously untranslated books from all over the world and rediscovering wonderful books in English that have fallen into undeserved obscurity. Fiction and non-fiction and books in a wide variety of genres can be found among the more than 500 NYRB Classics now in print, and it may be that what, as much as anything, unites the books in the series is that they hail from the past, however remote or recent. What does the past have to say to the present is the question that the series as a whole may be said to raise, and nowadays, when the authority of tradition is diminished and indeed suspect, it is a question of peculiar urgency. How do books haunt us? The novelist Rachel Cusk, the philosopher John Gray, the critic and writer Victoria Nelson, together with the founder and editor of NYRB Classics, Edwin Frank, will discuss.
Edwin Frank was born in Boulder, Colorado and educated at Harvard College and Columbia University. He is the founder of the New York Review Books Classics series, the author of Snake Train: Poems 1984-2013 (Shearsman Books), and the editor of The Red Thread: 20 Years of NYRB Classics (NYRB).
Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism and memoir. Her books include Gothicka and The Secret Life of Puppets, a stude of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studes in 2001, and Wild California, a collection of stories. She edited NYRB’s collection of Robert Aickman stories Compulsory Games. She teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing programme.
Rachel Cusk was born in 1967 and is the author of eight novels: Saving Agnes, which won the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Temporary, The Country Life, which won a Somerset Maugham Award, The Lucky Ones, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, In the Fold, Arlington Park, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, The Bradshaw Variations and Outline. Her non-fiction books are A Life’s Work, The Last Supper and Aftermath. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young Novelists.
John Gray is an English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.
Tickets for this event cost £5. Doors will open at 6.45pm, at which time there will be a small bar available from which to purchase drinks. For more information please call our Customer Service Desk on 01865 333 623 or email [email protected].