Did the prosperity of the last 20 years make American novelists soft? On Tuesday April 14 at 7pm, critic Walter Benn Michaels, The Wire creator and journalist David Simon (pictured), author Susan Straight, and novelist-critic Dale Peck will debate that question at the New York Public Library.
Co-sponsored by Bookforum, the literary conversation will debate what “The Death of Boom Culture” means for American authors. General admission tickets are $25, and $15 for library donors, seniors, and students with valid identification.
Here’s more from the release: “Among the ills afflicting the American novel at the height of boom culture, Walter Benn Michaels argues, was a curatorial obsession with past oppressions–from slavery to the Holocaust to memoir-style accounts of family abuse. Writers should now be asking less about what it meant to oppose the Holocaust, he contends, and more about what it means to support free trade.”