Tuesday, March 22, 2 pm
Hervé Le Tellier, author of
The Anomaly
In conversation with Daniel Goldin and Anne Leplae
Register for this event
here.
Boswell Book Company and Alliance Française de Milwaukee host a virtual event with Hervé Le Tellier, author of The Anomaly, the 2021 winner of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious literary prize, and now an international phenomenon.
Please note, a small portion of our interview with Le Tellier may be conducted in French, as a nod to our friends at AF de Milwaukee, but the majority of this presentation will be in English.
The Anomaly is a dizzying, whip-smart novel that blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi, and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight.
The New York Times named it one of the Best Thrillers of the Year, and says: "Enthralling… a profoundly affecting examination of free will, fate, reality, and the meaning of existence, cloaked in a high-concept plot that could have come from
The Twilight Zone or
Black Mirror… exists in that most excellent of Venn diagrams, where high entertainment meets serious literature."
From Boswellian Jason Kennedy: "A plane appears over the sky in the Atlantic heading to New York. Nothing astonishing with that, except this same plane already landed three months ago. How is this possible? And how does this change our perception of the world? The Anomaly is full of great discourse that will have you contemplating our choices and responsibilities in the world. There is a little bit of everything in this book: a love story, a thriller, a coming-out-story, a sci-fi tale, and childhood trauma. I guarantee your mind will be full for quite some time, digesting all the minutia that makes up this great speculative novel."
Hervé Le Tellier is a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic, and teacher. He has been a member of the Oulipo group since 1992 and one of the “papous” of the France Culture radio show. He is author of All Happy Families, Electrico W, and Enough About Love.
Wednesday, March 23, 6 pm
Boswell Book Company and Porchlight Book Company present an afternoon with Lillian Faderman for her latest, Woman: The American History of an Idea, a comprehensive history of the struggle to define womanhood in America, from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. For this event, Faderman will be in conversation with Sally Haldorson, Managing Director at Porchlight Book Company.
What does it mean to be a woman in America? Award-winning gender and sexuality scholar Lillian Faderman traces the evolution of the meaning from Puritan ideas of God’s plan for women to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and its reversals to the impact of such recent events as #metoo, the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and the transgender movement. This wide-ranging 400-year history chronicles conflicts, retreats, defeats, and hard-won victories in both the private and the public sectors and shines a light on the often-overlooked battles of enslaved women and women leaders in tribal nations. As she underlines, the idea of womanhood in America continues to be contested.
Publishers Weekly calls Faderman’s book "A comprehensive and lucid overview of the ongoing campaign to free women from 'the tyranny of old notions.'" And from Ellen Carol DuBois, author of
Suffrage: Women’s Long Battle for the Vote: "Lillian Faderman’s is a book many of us have been waiting for, the first comprehensive history of American women to capture the rich discoveries that have been made over the last half century, juxtaposing the abstraction of ‘woman’ with the range, resilience, and resistance of real women."
Lillian Faderman is professor emerita at California State University, Fresno. Her books on the history of gender and sexuality have won numerous prizes, including seven Lambda Literary Awards, two Stonewall Book Awards, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
Boswell presents an afternoon with Deborah Cohen, Northwestern University historian and author of Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War. Cohen’s book offers a revelatory account of a close-knit band of wildly famous American reporters who, in the run-up to World War II, took on dictators and rewrote the rules of modern journalism. You can read the recent New York Times review here.
In the aftermath of World War I, as fledgling democracies emerged from the ruins of defeated empires and strongmen grabbed power across Europe, millions of Americans, desperate to wall themselves off from the chaos, adopted an ‘America First’ stance. But a group of hard-hitting foreign correspondents envisioned a different role for the United States in the world: they warned their readers that tyranny abroad posed a threat even to America, and urged their fellow citizens to see their own fate as tied to global struggles.
Told with the immediacy of a conversation overheard, Cohen’s revelatory new book captures how the global upheavals of the twentieth century felt up close. From Fredrik Logevall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Embers of War and
JFK: "In this sterling book, Deborah Cohen follows a remarkable group of now mostly forgotten reporters as they try to make sense of a world turned upside down. The result is a shrewd and vivid work of history, one that combines deep research with lustrous narrative verve."
Deborah Cohen is the author of The War Come Home, Household Gods, and Family Secrets. She is also the Peter B Ritzma Professor of Humanities and Professor of History at Northwestern University, focusing on modern Europe. Lewis A Friedland is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor Emeritus in Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison, Founder of the Center for Communication and Democracy, and author or coauthor of five books.
More on the Upcoming events page.
Photo credits
Hervé Le Tellier by Cathy Bistour
Lillian Faderman by Phyllis Irwin
Deborah Cohen by Becca Heuer
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