The Center for Fiction Presents Rachel Cusk on Parade with Daniel Mendelsohn

Monday, 7:00 pm EDT June 17, 2024

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

Book Jacket - Parade Large

The Center for Fiction welcomes Rachel Cusk, author of Second Place and the Outline trilogy, to celebrate her latest novel Parade. The novel pushes the boundaries of novelistic form to tell the unconventional story of a group of artists, only identified as G. Using a fragmented narrative that shifts between the perspectives of various unnamed narrators, the novel explores themes of art, morality, and self-construction. Cusk shatters the limits of character and plot to expertly craft this one-of-a-kind novel.

A singular and visionary writer, Cusk innovates with every new work and has been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Booker Prize and Orange Prize for Fiction.Award-winning memoirist, critic, essayist and translator Daniel Mendelsohn (Three Rings) joins Cusk for a discussion of Parade, her most daring work yet. After the conversation, Cusk will sign books.

Book Jacket - Parade Large

In Conversation

  • Author Photo - Rachel Cusk - credit to Siemon Scamell-Katz

    Rachel Cusk

    Rachel Cusk

    Rachel Cusk is the author of Second Place, the Outline trilogy, the memoirs A Life’s Work and Aftermath, and several other works of fiction and nonfiction. Her new novel is Parade. She is a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Paris.


    Photo Credit: Siemon Scamell Katz

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    Daniel Mendelsohn

    Daniel Mendelsohn

    Daniel Mendelsohn is an award-winning memoirist, critic, essayist and translator. A longtime contributor to the New Yorker and New York Review of Books, where he is Editor-at-Large, he has been a columnist for BBC Culture, New York, Harpers, and the New York Times Book Review. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Library Journal, Kirkus, and Newsday, and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award, among many other honors; three collections of essays and criticism, most recently Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones; and a translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of Constantine’s Cavafy, a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. His translation of Homer’s Odyssey will be published next Spring by the University of Chicago Press. In April 2024, Mr. Mendelsohn conducted a four-part online seminar on Rachel Cusk’s Outline and Second Place for the New York Review’s NYRSeminars series.

Featured Book

  1. . 
    Book Jacket - Parade Large

    Parade

    By Rachel Cusk

    Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

    PURCHASE

    Midway through his life, the artist G begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

    In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

    At the age of twenty-two, the painter G leaves home for a new life in another country, far from the disapproval of her parents. Her paintings attract the disapproval of the man she later marries.

    When a mother dies, her children confront her legacy: the stories she told, the roles she assigned to them, the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

    Parade is a novel that demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell the story of G, an artist whose life contains many lives. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.

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