Rachel Cohen

Politics and Prose

July 20, 2020

6:00 p.m Eastern Time

With Claire Messud

You can register for the event here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rachel-cohen-austen-years-with-claire-messud-tickets-109195163674

I'm delighted to read from Austen Years, and to get to have a conversation about reading with the wonderful Claire Messud.

Claire Messud’s five novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and, most recently, The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a book of novellas, The Hunters (2001). A memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write, will be published in the fall of 2020. She teaches creative writing at Harvard University. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times Book Review, she lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.

https://www.literatibookstore.com/event/home-literati-rachel-cohen

What a pleasure to have a virtual homecoming reading at the wonderful Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, the place where I grew up, and where some of my new book Austen Years is set. I think we'll be able to hear the leaves rustling.

A rare chance to be in a conversation with two wonderful writers and close friends of mine, Maya Jasanoff, whose recent book is The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, and who won the NBCC Award for Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, and Vijay Seshadri, whose 3 Sections won the Pulitzer Prize, and whose new book That Was Now, This is Then is forthcoming from Graywolf in October.

This event is a joint effort of Farrar, Straus & Giroux's innovative crowdcast series and the new virtual series at the Seminary Coop bookstore, our home bookstore here on the South Side of Chicago and at the University of Chicago, where parts of my book Austen Years are set.

Please join me at the 92nd Street Y's virtual class series for any or all of three sessions on Emma.

Jane Austen’s Emma, as lovely as a summer walk in a meadow, is also about leading and following, education, Napoleon, imagination, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fine grain of community life and learning to read again.

Austen wrote Emma while her brothers were at sea in the fateful last year of Napoleon’s campaigns, from January of 1814 to March of 1815, and she wrote it to be read over and over. This August, in a summer of respite and strain, come for a walk in Highbury, and you may, if the weather is right, share with Emma “all the wonderful velocity of thought.”

Class meets Tuesdays: August 11, 18 and 25.

To register: https://www.92y.org/class/reading-austen-s-emma

Copies of Emma can be purchased from bookshop.org.

Please join me on August 15th, at 1 pm Eastern, I will be doing a conversation organized by St. Martin’s Press with Natalie Jenner, author of The Jane Austen Society, Janice Hadlow (The Other Bennett Sister) and Lucy Worsley (Jane Austen at Home). Moderated by Devooney Loooser (The Making of Jane Austen.) The link for this event is https://bit.ly/celebrationofjane

Bring your notebook and come with me (virtually!) to look at the wonderful Monet show at the Art Institute of Chicago. I'll be walking viewers through the beautiful and tranquil last room of Monet in Chicago, which has seven water lily paintings in it. We'll take our time, looking slowly ourselves and thinking about Monet's slow looking, and then we'll do a writing exercise using details to look carefully up close. Whether you can go to the show in person or not, you'll feel you had an hour's quiet reflection in the presence of one of the show's great achievements. The event is free, but registration is required. See link below. Hope to see you there.

Please join me for a virtual presentation, the Ninth Annual Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Tennessee's Humanities Center.

Please join me for a conversation I'm greatly looking forward to on Living as Readers at virtual Harvard University with Katharine Smyth (All The Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf) and Deidre Lynch (Loving Literature: A Cultural History).

Please come and read Pride and Prejudice with me at the 92nd Street Y on three Tuesdays this December. The events support the 92nd Street Y, which graciously offers my former students a $20 discount off the regular ticket price by using the code Bennet.

Course description and ticket purchase here:

https://www.92y.org/class/reading-austen-s-pride-and-prejudice

Course Description:

When Jane Austen got the first copies of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote to her sister “I have got my own darling Child from London.”

It was January of 1813, a cold season and the Napoleonic Wars were raging. The arrival of Elizabeth Bennet was cheering indeed, “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.” Austen had worked very hard to achieve the effervescent quickness of the book, and she had learned a lot as she wrote and rewrote. The book itself is also about reading, learning to judge characters, letting an internal voice come through in the world, revising, walking, and reading again, all very much of the moment. In the dark days of December, please join me in discovering, or discovering again, the complex landscape of Pride & Prejudice, Austen’s delightful character, and the wonderful relationships this author and character have to time.

Class meets Tuesdays, December 1, 8, 15.

Copies of Pride and Prejudice, as well as Cohen’s Austen Year: A Memoir in Five Novels, can be purchased from bookshop.org.

Please come and read Pride and Prejudice with me at the 92nd Street Y on three Tuesdays this December. The events support the 92nd Street Y, which graciously offers my former students a $20 discount off the regular ticket price by using the code Bennet.

Course description and ticket purchase here:

https://www.92y.org/class/reading-austen-s-pride-and-prejudice

Course Description:

When Jane Austen got the first copies of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote to her sister “I have got my own darling Child from London.”

It was January of 1813, a cold season and the Napoleonic Wars were raging. The arrival of Elizabeth Bennet was cheering indeed, “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.” Austen had worked very hard to achieve the effervescent quickness of the book, and she had learned a lot as she wrote and rewrote. The book itself is also about reading, learning to judge characters, letting an internal voice come through in the world, revising, walking, and reading again, all very much of the moment. In the dark days of December, please join me in discovering, or discovering again, the complex landscape of Pride & Prejudice, Austen’s delightful character, and the wonderful relationships this author and character have to time.

Class meets Tuesdays, December 1, 8, 15.

Copies of Pride and Prejudice, as well as Cohen’s Austen Year: A Memoir in Five Novels, can be purchased from bookshop.org.

Please come and read Pride and Prejudice with me at the 92nd Street Y on three Tuesdays this December. The events support the 92nd Street Y, which graciously offers my former students a $20 discount off the regular ticket price by using the code Bennet.

Course description and ticket purchase here:

https://www.92y.org/class/reading-austen-s-pride-and-prejudice

Course Description:

When Jane Austen got the first copies of Pride and Prejudice, she wrote to her sister “I have got my own darling Child from London.”

It was January of 1813, a cold season and the Napoleonic Wars were raging. The arrival of Elizabeth Bennet was cheering indeed, “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.” Austen had worked very hard to achieve the effervescent quickness of the book, and she had learned a lot as she wrote and rewrote. The book itself is also about reading, learning to judge characters, letting an internal voice come through in the world, revising, walking, and reading again, all very much of the moment. In the dark days of December, please join me in discovering, or discovering again, the complex landscape of Pride & Prejudice, Austen’s delightful character, and the wonderful relationships this author and character have to time.

Class meets Tuesdays, December 1, 8, 15.

Copies of Pride and Prejudice, as well as Cohen’s Austen Year: A Memoir in Five Novels, can be purchased from bookshop.org.

I am honored to be hosting a reading and conversation with Valeria Luiselli, one of my favorite writers, who will be at the Literary Arts Lab Festival presented by the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago.

Please come and join us at this FREE event, to hear Luiselli read from recent work and to hear our conversation about migration, the language of children, the meanings of archives, and more.

Please join me at the virtual Goucher College Library for what promises to be a wonderful evening. I'll be reading from Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, and then having a conversation with the brilliant Juliette Wells, renowned Austen scholar and professor at Goucher. We'll have a chance to show some of the rare Austen materials housed in Goucher's library, including some that were included in Juliette Wells's Penguin Classics edition of Jane Austen's Persuasion.