Rachel Cohen

2024 has been an exciting year for A Chance Meeting: American Encounters in the wonderful reissue by New York Review of Books Classics.

The book inspired a seminar series at Author's Guild, "Chance Meetings," with brilliant talks: Colm Toíbín on Henry James, Brenda Wineapple on Walt Whitman, Merve Emre on Willa Cather, Saidiya Hartman on W.E.B. Du Bois, Daphne Brooks on Zora Neale Hurston, and Langdon Hammer on Elizabeth Bishop, and I did two book-end lectures on double portraits, portrait photography, drawing together James Whitman Cather Du Bois, Hurston and Bishop with Richard Avedon, Carl Van Vechten, Mathew Brady, Edward Steichen, and many more. If you're interested to see the videos of one or all of the lectures, you can connect to the seminars at Author's Guild here.

A Chance Meeting was a top 10 bestseller among books in the New York Review of Books catalogue for 2024...

was warmly reviewed in the TLS and in the Wall Street Journal...

and was one of Hillary Louise Kelly's favorite books of 2024 -- "I’d give a lot for more books like this—no flashy publishing angle, no overemphasized thesis about the state of things, just hard-won stories told in delightful prose."