SAVE THE DATE
FEBRUARY 10, 2:30PM EST
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
CLICK HERE FOR EVENT DETAILS
SELECT TITLES BY THE PARTICIPANTS
WILL BE AVAILABLE TO PURCHASE
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Covid and Literature10 February 2024
247 East 82nd Street
New York, NY 10028
Fractured: Covid 19 – Memento Mori vs. Memento Vivere; “COVID-19 Betrays America’s Cult of Curdled Optimism”; This Exquisite Loneliness; The Lonely Stories; 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed; The Quarantine Tapes; these titles were all attempts by our panelists to endure and make sense of the Pandemic. “Each of us adrift on our own ghost ships,” wrote one of them, Simon Critchley, in a piece called “To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die.” Another, Richard Deming, observed that “the writing life, the life of the mind, is not an escape or separation from life, but the way of engaging it, head on, no matter the weather.” This Round Table will focus on the literature that emerged from that time which – to be sure – is not yet over. *Titles by these authors will be available to purchase at the event.
This roundtable will also be streamed live and can be watched on Youtube (youtube.com/helixcenter) or on our website (helixcenter.org/videos).
Click Here For Event Details and Participant List
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Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York and a Member of the Board of Directors of the Onassis Foundation. His books include Very Little…Almost Nothing (1997), Infinitely Demanding (2007), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009) and The Faith of the Faithless (2012). He has also writtena novella, Memory Theatre (2015), a book-length essay, Notes on Suicide (2020) and studies of David Bowie, Football and Apply-Degger (Onassis, 2020). More recent books are Tragedy, The Greeks and Us (Pantheon, 2019) and Bald (Yale, 2021). He was series moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in The New York Times and co-editor of three volumes connected to the series, most recently Question Everything (2022). He is 50% of an obscure musical combo called Critchley & Simmons, whose new album, Gone Forever, is released in 2024. Mysticism – The Experience of Ecstasy will be published by The New York Review of Books (USA) and Profile (UK) in 2024, as well as a book on tragedy called I Want Die, I Hate My Life with ERIS.
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Natalie Eve Garrett is an artist and a writer. She’s the editor of THE LONELY STORIES, a cathartic collection of personal essays from 22 celebrated writers about the joys and struggles of being alone, out now from Catapult. She’s also the editor of EAT JOY (Catapult, 2019), a collection of stories exploring how food can help us cope in dark times, and THE ARTISTS’ AND WRITERS’ COOKBOOK (pH Books, 2016), a collection of stories with recipes with beloved artists and writers. A graduate of Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, Natalie lives with her husband Tony, their daughter and son Serafina and Aurelio, and Zephyr the puppy, in a little town near DC and along the Potomac River.
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Eric Klinenberg is the Helen Gould Shepard Professor in the Social Sciences and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed, Palaces for the People, Going Solo, Heat Wave, and Fighting for Air, and coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance. In addition to his scholarship, has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, Wired, and This American Life.
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Daphne Merkin is a novelist and critic who has made a name for herself with her often-unnerving candor and forthright attitude towards issues of family, religion, money, and sex as well as her ability to straddle the High/Low cultural divide. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked in book publishing for six years as first a senior editor and then associate publisher, acquiring fiction and non-fiction. In 1997, Merkin became a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she published book pieces as well as essays on personal and cultural issues, including features on Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, and the legacy of Sigmund Freud; she also alternated writing the movie column with Anthony Lane. One of her New Yorker essays, “Trouble in the Tribe”, was chosen for The Best American Essays of 2001, as well as The Best Spiritual Essays. Merkin is the author of Enchantment (1986), which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for best novel on a Jewish theme and was reissued by Picador (2020), with an introduction by Vivien Gornick. She has also published two collections of essays, The Fame Lunches (2014, FSG ) , which was named a New York Times Notable book,and Dreaming of Hitler(1997, Crown), as well as a memoir about her life-long struggle with depression, This Close to Happy (2017), which received a front page review in the New York Times Book Review. Her latest book, a novel called 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love, was published in July 2020 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Merkin continues to write cultural criticism and book pieces for a variety of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, Airmail, and The New York Review of Books. Shen has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount Manhattan College, Hunter College, and at Columbia University’s MFA program. She lives in New York City.
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Maria G. Pisano is a book artist, printmaker, curator and educator and publishes her work under the Memory Press imprint. Memory Press works are represented in The Library of Congress, 9-11 Memorial Museum, National Library of Medicine, Columbia University, New York Public Library, Stanford University and many more. She has exhibited widely. Her book Caudex Folium is in the exhibit Towers Rising at the 9-11 Memorial Museum in NYC, and in 2022 her work was in “And Yet We Rise: A Retrospect of the Days and Times Surrounding 9/11″ at the American Consulate in London. She has curated a number exhibits including Book as Witness: The Artist’s Response at Center for Book Arts in NYC and Crossroads: Book Artists’ Impassioned Responses to Immigration, Human Rights and Our Environment, at the Hunterdon Museum of Art, NJ. Ms. Pisano contributes to book arts publications and has presented lectures at the Library of Congress, College Book Arts Association and the Art Libraries Society of North America. Her article “Mark To Impress” was published in California Society of Printmakers Journal and The Blue Notebook in the UK. She continuously gives workshops nationally and internationally, at her studio, libraries and institutions such as Bridwell Library, Dallas TX and Center for Book Arts in NYC.
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