Three Rings: A Conversation with Daniel Mendelsohn and Edouard Louis

Join best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn and French novelist Edouard Louis as they discuss Mendelsohn’s latest book Three Rings, just published by University of Virginia Press, over Zoom.

Combining memoir, biography, fiction, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own—works that pondered the very nature of narrative. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler’s Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul… François Fénelon, the 17th century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to Homer’s Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus—a veiled critique of the Sun King and the bestselling book in Europe for a hundred years—resulted in his banishment… and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Already hailed as an “astounding Borgesian document of clarity and brilliance” (Sebastian Barry), Mendelsohn pushes against the boundaries of genre as he explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell.

As Edouard Louis also specializes precisely in this dissolution of the boundaries between self, reality, and history, this conversation is bound to take as many remarkable twists and turns as Mendelsohn’s book! For as Louis himself recently wrote concerning the recent explosion of remarkable and unclassifiable non-fiction work: “I am convinced that we are witnessing a revolution comparable to that of the 19th century novel, and that this dynamic around the autobiographical form has established a true avant-gardisme that is only at the beginning of its story.”

In English. Kindly RSVP to the following link to attend: https://bit.ly/30Luvjh

This talk is free and open to our online community. Nevertheless, in order to support Albertine during these challenging times, we would greatly appreciate it if you purchased either a French or an English copy of Three Rings at our store.