Helen Garner read from her latest book of essays, Everywhere I Look, a collection that spans ten years of writing and various subjects. She spoke about writing essays and writing her previous books with Ben Lerner, author of The Hatred of Poetry.
The London Review of Books hosted a panel on 21st Century Narrators at the Brooklyn Book Festival. LRB senior editor Christian Lorentzen moderated Elif Batuman, Ben Lerner, Christine Smallwood, and Lorin Stein in a discussion. Batuman is a non-fiction writer who regularly contributes to The New Yorker and author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. Lerner is the author of the novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. Christine Smallwood is a columnist for Harper’s Magazine and Lorin Stein is the editor of Paris Review.
The experience of art became the focus of the evening when Geoff Dyer and Ben Lerner came together for a reading and conversation moderated by Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review at McNally Jackson Books. Dyer read from his book, Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (November 2013), that looks at the personal experience of viewing Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker. Ben Lerner read from his novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011).