92nd Street Y (92Y) (Venue Partner)
1395 Lexington Ave
212.415.5500
This event has passed.
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jameswoods
- When
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Monday Mar 22, 2010 (8:15pm)
- Where
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Directions: Corner of 92nd St and Lexington Ave
- Price
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$19.00 / $10.00
James Wood takes on a special assignment this season—to read a book he’s never read before, then return to the Poetry Center and discuss it. He’s chosen Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a collection of short stories by David Foster Wallace.
When Wallace died in 2008, Wood wrote, “Whatever one felt about his work, it was hard to imagine any serious reader of fiction not being intensely interested in what he was going to do next. I had been looking forward to witnessing his literary journey, and to adjusting my own opinions and prejudices—or rather, being forced by the quality of the work to do so. Of great interest to me was his own ambivalent relation with some elements of postmodernism (irony, too-easy self-consciousness, and so on), and the burgeoning presence of moral critique in his work. One had the feeling that this new work was being written under considerable pressure— and I don’t just mean psychological pressure, but the pressure of staying loyal to his fractured, non-linear epistemology while at the same time incorporating some of that admiration he had for the concerns of the nineteenth-century novel. To put it flippantly, he was aesthetically radical and metaphysically conservative, and the negotiation of that asymmetry would have been a marvelous thing to follow, as a reader.”
James Wood “is our best critic,” wrote Cynthia Ozick. “He thinks with a sublime ferocity.” Join us as he re-thinks the work of David Foster Wallace.
