Online Event: Paul Lisicky Presents Later: My Life at the Edge of World with Andrea Lawlor

Free

Tuesday, 7:30 pm EDT April 14, 2020

7:30pm ET / 4:30pm PT

Join us to celebrate Paul Lisicky’s memoir of coming of age in Provincetown during the AIDS crisis. He will be joined by Andrea Lawlor, whose novel Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl also travels through the LGBTQ haven at the end of Cape Cod. They will talk about both of their books, queer communities, queer aesthetics, and community in a time of crisis – something we can all relate to now.

Purchase Later: My Life at the Edge of the World at Our Online Bookstore

Featuring

Paul Lisicky

Paul Lisicky

Paul Lisicky is the author of five books, including The Narrow Door (a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, among others. He teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Brooklyn.
Andrea Lawlor

Andrea Lawlor

Andrea Lawlor teaches writing at Mount Holyoke College, edits fiction for Fence magazine, and has been awarded fellowships by Lambda Literary and Radar Labs. Their writing has appeared in various literary journals including Ploughshares, Mutha, the Millions, jubilat, the Brooklyn Rail, Faggot Dinosaur, and Encyclopedia, Vol. II. Their publications include a chapbook, Position Papers (Factory Hollow Press, 2016), and a novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a 2018 finalist for the Lambda Literary and CLMP Firecracker Awards. Paul, originally published by Rescue Press in 2017, has been re-released in the US by Vintage/Knopf and published in the British Commonwealth by Picador UK.

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Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

By Paul Lisicky

Published by Graywolf Press

PURCHASE

With his newest book, Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (March 17, 2020), Lisicky gives us an incandescent, mold-breaking memoir that is equal parts coming-of-age story and portrait of an extraordinary, far-flung haven of artists and outsiders—roughly 3,600 in number—facing a dire AIDS crisis, with several funerals being held weekly.

Lisicky brings us to a very specific place and time—Provincetown in the first half of the 1990s—but he writes about the human condition so exquisitely that the book transcends specificity and becomes a meditation on what it means to be human—to love, to lose, to hurt, to yearn, to be afraid, to be accepted and embraced. In prose that is at turns sumptuous and strikingly original, uncannily perceptive and laugh-out-loud funny, Lisicky ruminates on community and belonging, art-making, family dysfunction, love, joy, sex and sexuality, illness, grief, doubt, anger, loneliness, and the sublime landscape and wildlife in far-eastern Massachusetts (“the edge of the world”).

“Later is a vital, dazzling memoir not just of a passage in one life, but of a place, a time, an ethos. Both telescopic and microscopic, this story challenges and illuminates—and, as only the best books do, leaves the reader fundamentally transformed.” —Rebecca Makkai