Claire Messud and Anne Enright on Writing

Free

Online Event

Tuesday, 7:30 pm EDT October 13, 2020

Donate $10 to Help Support Our Events

The transformative experience of a “single successful sentence” is one of the many reasons why Claire Messud is driven to tell stories. In her evocative new essay collection, Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write, she sorts through those reasons like old photos in a keepbox.

Man Booker-winning Anne Enright (Actress, The Gathering) joins Messud in a thoughtful conversation on the travels, people, and books that have nourished their devotion to literature.

Daniel Mendelsohn from the New York Review of Books will moderate.

In Conversation

Claire Messud

Claire Messud

Claire Messud is a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe Fellowships and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is the author of six works of fiction including the New York Times bestsellers The Emperor’s Children and The Burning Girl, which was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her family.

Photo courtesy of Ulf Andersen.
Anne Enright

Anne Enright

Anne Enright is author of five novels, most recently Actress. Among the awards she has received are the Man Booker Prize for The Gathering and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz. She lives in Dublin.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Simpson for Penguin 2020.

Featured Books

.

Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write

By Claire Messud

Published by W.W. Norton & Company

PURCHASE

In twenty-nine intimate, brilliant, funny, and sharp essays, Messud reflects on a childhood move from her Connecticut home to Australia; the complex relationship between her modern Canadian mother and a fiercely single French Catholic aunt; and a trip to Beirut, where her pied-noir father had once lived, while he was dying. She meditates on Albert Camus, Teju Cole, and Valeria Luiselli, and tours her favorite paintings at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Crafting a vivid portrait of a life in celebration of the power of literature, Messud proves once again “an absolute master storyteller” (Rebecca Carroll, Los Angeles Times).
.

Actress

By Anne Enright

Published by W. W. Norton & Company

PURCHASE

Bringing to life two generations of women with difficult sexual histories, both assaulted and silenced, both finding–or failing to find–their powers of recovery, Actress touches a raw and timely nerve. With virtuosic storytelling and in prose at turns lyrical and knife-sharp, Enright takes readers to the heart of the maddening yet tender love that binds a mother and daughter.

.