A Proust Party: Marcelle Clements, Eric Karpeles, Andre Aciman, Caroline Weber

• Books & Literature
• Free

On Wednesday July 10, Marcel Proust’s 148th birthday, McNally Jackson Books will host a panel and discussion to celebrate this brilliant, enigmatic writer who remains one of our bookstore’s true patron saints. Proust scholars André Aciman, Marcelle Clements, Eric Karpeles, and Caroline Weber will each present a selection from In Search of Lost Time which holds special meaning for them before diving into what’s new in Proust studies from a broader point of view. This event is designed for all levels of readers, however, from those who haven’t quite found the motivation to begin to those who have lost a great deal of time over Proust already.

Marcelle Clements is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. Her fourth and most recent book is a novel, Midsummer. She has written prizewinning essays and articles for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Esquire, Elle, and Rolling Stone. Since 1999, she has taught a seminar on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time at NYU’s College of Arts and Science, where she is a Collegiate Professor. She is a recipient of NYU’s Golden Dozen Teaching Award.

A Fellow of the Czesław Miłosz Institute at the Claremont Colleges, Eric Karpeles is a painter, writer, and translator. His book Paintings in Proust has appeared in several languages. He translated Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp (by Józef Czapski) from the French and Proust’s Overcoat from the Italian (by Lorenza Foschini). His biography, Almost Nothing: The 20th Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski, was published late in 2018 to considerable acclaim, and his richly-illustrated monograph, Józef Czapski: An Apprenticeship of Looking, will be released in October 2019.

André Aciman is the New York Times bestselling author of Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, and Harvard Square, and most recently Enigma Variations, now out in paperback. He’s the editor of The Proust Project and teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.

Caroline Weber is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University; she has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. She is the author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006) She has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review,Financial Times, London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and New York magazine. She lives in New York City.