"The Storytellers" - Michael Gorra in Conversation with Christopher Benfey

About this event

Coolidge Museum. In partnership with Forbes Library, Broadside Bookshop is pleased to present a reading and conversation with local author and scholar Michael Gorra. Michael Gorra will read from and discuss his newest book, The Storytellers: Reading the Masterpieces of Nineteenth-Century Short Fiction. Michael will be joined in conversation by Christopher Benfey. Books will be available for sale and a signing will follow the reading and conversation. This event will also be livestreamed on the Forbes YouTube channel. Click here to view. About the Book: The Storytellers offers a far-reaching account of the rich tradition of short narratives that flourished in nineteenth-century Europe and America, one that both prepared for and eventually gave way to the modern short story. Tracing unexpected resemblances across languages and decades, Michael Gorra restores a wide-angle view of the form in which works usually treated as stand-alone classics reveal themselves as parts of a single, lively conversation. What unites these tales, Gorra argues, is their blend of novelty and unity. The book's heart lies in a series of accessible readings of great tales by Herman Melville, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Turgenev, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and many more. Beyond its consideration of individual works, The Storytellers examines the formal and thematic concerns that bind the century together: the use of frame tales, accounts of social marginality, and an abundance of ghosts and uncanny coincidences. Over time, Gorra shows, these qualities yielded to a cooler realism, with Anton Chekhov as the key transitional figure. His compressed studies of ordinary lives inspired the modern short story and consigned the gothic flourishes of earlier tales to genre fiction. What do we want from a story? What makes a tale worth telling? The nineteenth-century tale sought not the grand "meaning of life" promised by the novel,…

Description from forbeslibrary.libcal.com