Canceled — On Re-reading: Vivian Gornick and Alix Kates Shulman

$10

Admission and $10 off at our bookstore

Out of stock

Wednesday, 7:00 pm EDT March 25, 2020

The Center for Fiction

This event has been canceled. If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected].

To celebrate Vivian Gornick’s new book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, as well as new editions of both Gornick and Alix Kates Shulman’s earlier publications, these friends will discuss their reading lives and why we return to books we’ve read.

This event is part of our On Reading series: What makes us return to stories we’ve read, sometimes again and again, and how do we make time for this life-enriching pleasure? On Reading is a passionate and motivating call to lead a well-read life.

Featuring

Vivian Gornick

Author photo by Mitchell Bach

Vivian Gornick

Author photo by Mitchell Bach

Vivian Gornick is the author of several books, including the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments, named the best memoir of the past 50 years by the New York Times Book Review in 2019; the essay collections The End of the Novel of Love and The Men in My Life, both of which were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; and The Odd Woman and the City, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Her new book is Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader. She began her career as a staff writer for the Village Voice in 1969, and her work has since appeared in the New York Times, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, and many other publications.
Alix Kates Shulman

Author photo by Sara Krulwich

Alix Kates Shulman

Author photo by Sara Krulwich

Alix Kates Shulman is the author of fourteen books, among them three memoirs (the award-winning Drinking the Rain, A Good Enough Daughter, and To Love What Is) and five novels. Her newly reissued debut novel, the million-copy bestselling Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, established her as a primary figure in feminism’s second wave. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Nation, the Guardian, and n+1, among other publications. Currently, she is co-editing, with Honor Moore, the Library of America anthology Women’s Liberation! Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution (And Still Can). In 2018 Shulman received a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism.

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Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader

By Vivian Gornick

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PURCHASE

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle, and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats.
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Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen

By Alix Kates Shulman

Published by Picador

PURCHASE

Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen created a profound impact on the cultural landscape when it was originally published in 1972. A sardonic portrayal of one white, middle-class, Midwestern girl’s coming-of-age, the novel takes a wry and prescient look at a range of experiences treated at the time as taboo but which were ultimately accepted as matters of major political significance: sexual harassment, job discrimination, the sexual double standard, rape, abortion restrictions, the double binds of marriage and motherhood, and the frantic quest for beauty.

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