The New Yorker staff writer Janet Malcolm is set to speak at Princeton University Nov. 7.
Malcolm plans to read from and discuss her most recent book, Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers 5 p.m. in McCosh Hall, Room 10.
Lewis Center for the Arts creative writing lecturer A. M. Homes is set to introduce her. Homes is an award-winning novelist, memoirist and frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times.
An acclaimed biographer, Malcolm will discuss the life and work of Gene (Geneva) Stratton-Porter, a bestselling author of popular novels in the early 20th century. Reading Stratton-Porter’s novels as a kind of “capitalist pastorale,” Malcolm exposes the materialism and consumerism in the author’s proto-environmentalism and her fairy-tale-like Cinderella stories, including the popular and much beloved romance A Girl of the Limberlost.
Malcolm is the author The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography.
A frequent writer for The New York Review of Books, Malcolm’s most recent collection of essays takes on a variety of subjects: painters, photographers, writers and artists. Ranging from Bloomsbury’s visual culture to the Gossip Girl novels, and from Edith Wharton to J. D. Salinger, Malcolm’s journalistic reporting rises, as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction to Forty-One False Starts, “to the highest level of literature.”
The event is free and open to the public.
More information is online at humanities.princeton.edu/events/belknap-visitors.
