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Thursday, July 6, 2023, 6:00 pm PST

Jane Smiley

Price: Free

City Lights in conjunction with Heyday Books present Jane Smiley in conversation with Steve Wasserman celebrating the publication of The Questions that Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom – by Jane Smiley – Published by Heyday Books – This event will be held in Kerouac Alley, between Columbus and Grant Avenues, and City Lights and Vesuvio Cafe. Admission is free to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. This event will not be broadcast live, but an audio recording will be made to be posted on our podcast site.

City Lights in conjunction with Heyday Books present

Jane Smiley in conversation with Steve Wasserman

celebrating the publication of

The Questions that Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom

by Jane Smiley

Published by Heyday Books

Jane Smiley has long been acclaimed as one of America’s preeminent novelists. Less known is her nonfiction, her steady and penetrating essays on some of the aesthetic and cultural issues that mark any serious engagement with reading and writing. Her approach is both enthusiastic and meticulous, always quick to dive beneath surface-level interpretations of authors and their work. This volume of nonfiction begins with a personal introduction that traces Smiley’s migration from Iowa to California a quarter-century ago. She soon found herself grappling with the rich and varied literature of a state whose writers were engaging with a contested history of race, class, identity, and sex. As she considers the ambiguity of character and the weight of history, her essays provide new entry points into literature, and we lucky readers can see how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford. Throughout, Smiley seeks to think harder and, in her words, with “more clarity and nuance” about the questions that matter most.

Jane Smiley is a novelist and essayist. Her novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1987. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her novel Some Luck was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award. She has written for numerous magazines and newspapers, including the New Yorker, the New York Times, Harper’s, and the Nation. Her most recent novel, A Dangerous Business, was published in 2022. She lives in Carmel Valley, California.

Steve Wasserman is the publisher of Heyday Books. He is a former editor-at-large for Yale University Press and editorial director of Times Books/Random House and publisher of Hill & Wang and The Noonday Press at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. A founder of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at the University of Southern California, Wasserman was a principal architect of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books during the nine years he served as editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review (1996–2005). He has written for numerous publications, including The Village Voice, Threepenny Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The American Conservative, The Progressive, Columbia Journalism Review, Los Angeles Times, and the (London) Times.

This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/

Type of Event:
Offsite

Registration Required:
No

Start Date:
Thursday, July 6, 2023, 6:00 pm PST

End Date:
Thursday, July 6, 2023, 7:30 pm PST

Venue:
This event will be held in Kerouac Alley, between Columbus and Grant Avenues, and City Lights and Vesuvio Cafe. Admission is free to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis.

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