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An Evening with Garth Risk Hallberg, bestselling author of CITY ON FIRE
November 15, 2016 | 4:15 pm - 5:30 pm
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Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of City on Fire, named a best book of 2015 by the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. His book has been translated into 17 languages.
In a lecture at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Hallberg will explore the affinities between the modern social novel and the modern city. From Dicken’s London to Richard Wright’s Chicago, from the Paris of Les Misérable to the Boston of The Bostonians, the two have developed in parallel. But for a novelist, the relationship goes deeper than content. Hallberg will examine some principles that link the multipolar city and the multicharacter novel and suggest how each might provide not just what you need to live, but what makes the living worth doing in the first place.
Liz Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute and the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies at Harvard University, will moderate a panel discussion between Hallberg and novelist Claire Messud RI ’05, a senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard.
This event is free and open to the public. To register for the event, please visit the event webpage.
Did You Know?
Certain books were “banned in Boston” at least as far back as 1651, when one William Pynchon wrote a book criticizing Puritanism.