“Get Lit After Work” With Howard Axelrod

Boston Literary District hosts the second installment of “Get Lit After Work,” our pop-up literary biergarten, in front of the Cheers bar in the Faneuil Hall Marketplace with Howard Axelrod, author of the critically acclaimed, POINT OF VANISHING: A MEMOIR OF TWO YEARS IN SOLITUDE.

On a clear May afternoon at the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy’s finger hooked behind Axelrod’s eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the same dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could trust, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and largely without human contact, for two years. He needed to find, away from society’s pressures and rush, a sense of meaning that couldn’t be changed in an instant.

“What makes his book completely mesmerizing—besides his lovely prose, that is—is how exquisitely it balances between the poles of revelation and disintegration. Yet, refreshingly, he never repudiates the extremity of what he’s done. He’s come in from the woods with a strange tale to tell, but what makes you want to stop whatever you’re doing and listen to him is the frosty breath of the wild that still clings to his coat.”
—Slate Book Review

This talk will be free and open to the public and will be followed by a book signing.