Kristen Radtke on Seek You with Leslie Jamison

Tuesday, 6:00 pm EDT July 6, 2021

Online via Zoom

With many the world over stuck at home, the pandemic exposed a quieter epidemic that had already been ripping through America—the epidemic of loneliness. In emotionally charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke’s newest book Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness navigates the different ways our inner lives interact with our public selves and the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another.

She’ll dig deeper into this topic and the July 16th release of her book in a conversation with Leslie Jamison, author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Empathy Exams.

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In Conversation

Kristen Radtke

Kristen Radtke

Kristen Radtke is the author of the graphic nonfiction book Imagine Wanting Only This. The recipient of a 2019 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, Radtke is the art director and deputy publisher of The Believer. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Marie Claire, the Atlantic, the Guardian, GQ, Vogue, and Oxford American, among many other publications.
Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison

Leslie Jamison is the author of The Recovering, The Empathy Exams, Make it Scream, Make it Burn, and a novel, The Gin Closet. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and teaches at Columbia University.

Featured Book

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Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness

By Kristen Radtke

Published by Pantheon

PURCHASE

There is a silent epidemic in America: loneliness. Shameful to talk about and often misunderstood, loneliness is everywhere, from the most major of metropolises to the smallest of towns.

In Seek You, Kristen Radtke’s wide-ranging exploration of our inner lives and public selves, Radtke digs into the ways in which we attempt to feel closer to one another, and the distance that remains. Through the lenses of gender and violence, technology and art, Radtke ushers us through a history of loneliness and longing, and shares what feels impossible to share.

Ranging from the invention of the laugh-track to the rise of Instagram, the bootstrap-pulling cowboy to the brutal experiments of Harry Harlow, Radtke investigates why we engage with each other, and what we risk when we turn away. With her distinctive, emotionally-charged drawings and deeply empathetic prose, Kristen Radtke masterfully shines a light on some of our most vulnerable and sublime moments, and asks how we might keep the spaces between us from splitting entirely.