May 10th
7pm
What does it mean to be a politically committed writer?
“What strikes the reader immediately is Adam Shatz’s range, that of his subjects and that of his learning. It tells us that these essays come from a very free and strong mind. His independence of spirit is part of the intellectual tradition of the wonderfully written work that beguiles us into contemplation, further thought. We follow his questions into the past and return with better understandings of the present. A gifted soul for our times.” —Darryl Pinckney
Through a close reading of the lives and works of some of the greatest intellectuals of recent times, Adam Shatz asks: do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remain a dispassionate thinker when involved in the cut and thrust of politics? And, in an age of horror and crisis, what does it mean to be a committed writer?
Shatz interrogates the major figures of twentieth and twenty-first century thought and finds within their lives and work the roots of our present intellectual and geopolitical situation.
Charting the role of the committed intellectual through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre on the Algerian War and Edward Said's lifelong solidarity with the Palestinian people, to Fouad Ajami's role as the "native informant" for pro-intervention cause in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, alongside philosophers and critics Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Claude Lévi-Strauss and the novelists Michel Houllebecq and Richard Wright, each struggled to reconcile their writing and their politics, their thought and their commitments.
Writers and Missionaries is an erudite and incisive work of intellectual elucidation and biographical enquiry that demands that we interrogate anew the relation of thought and action in the struggle for a more just world.
Adam Shatz is the US editor of the London Review of Books and a visiting professor at Bard College. He is the author of a collection, Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination, which will be published in May by Verso Books, and of an intellectual biography of Frantz Fanon, The Rebel's Clinic, which will be published in early 2024 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Vinson Cunningham is a staff writer and a theatre critic at the New Yorker. His essays, reviews, and profiles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, FADER, Vulture, The Awl, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Commonweal. In 2020, he was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for his profile of the comedian Tracy Morgan. A former White House staffer, he now teaches in the MFA Writing program at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York City. His debut novel is forthcoming from Hogarth/Random House.
In order to keep our events program running in uncertain times, we're asking attendees to hold their place with a $5 voucher, redeemable on the night of the event on any product in store or in our bar & café. If you have a change of heart or plans, write to events@mcnallyjackson.com and we'll gladly refund you and release your spot, up to 24 hours before the event. Thanks for understanding, and for supporting your local bookstore.
