MAY 7 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Capturing History in Personal Writing
Rich Benjamin & André Aciman
Choose an RSVP Option:
I'd just like a seat, please - $5.00
I'd like a seat and Talk to Me - $29.00
I'd like a seat and Roman Year - $30.00
This conversation explores how André Aciman and Rich Benjamin chronicle “a living past”—and excavate history— in recent acclaimed works. How do authors such as they successfully interweave big history, a kind of lyrical scholarship, with personal narrative? How do they convey a poetry of place? This conversation examines how private experience probed in their work contributes to collective understanding, the better to enlighten and entertain readers.
André Aciman is the author of Call Me by Your Name, Homo Irrealis, Find Me, Eight White Nights, Out of Egypt, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, and Enigma Variations, and is the editor of The Proust Project. He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and lives with his wife in Manhattan.
Rich Benjamin is a cultural anthropologist and the author of the acclaimed family memoir, Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History (Pantheon Books, 2025). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New York Review of Books. He is also a sought-after lecturer and a public-facing scholar often interviewed in international media, including on MSNBC, CNN, and BBC. His work has received support from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, Princeton University, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.