Claire Messud

discusses

Granta 118: Exit Strategies

with editor JOHN FREEMAN

This event includes a book signing

Date

Feb
9
Thursday
February 9, 2012
8:00 PM ET

Location

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

Tickets

This event is free; no tickets are required.

Harvard Book Store is thrilled to welcome novelist and Granta contributor CLAIRE MESSUD for a discussion of the literary magazine's latest issue. She is joined by JOHN FREEMAN, editor of Granta since 2009.

Be it a wrong turn, a bad relationship, a debilitating illness or a war, every action creates a reaction, every move is followed by another move. How do we get out of what we've gotten ourselves into? Granta 118 zooms in close on the phenomenon of the exit strategy. In a new story, Alice Munro writes of an elderly woman whose attempts to care for her husband are undermined by her own deteriorating thought processes; Claire Messud searches for her father's past in Beirut, Lebanon as he lays dying in a hospital in the US; and Aleksandar Hemon remembers the importance of smuggling his family's dog out of war-torn Sarajevo. Exit Strategies also features new writing by John Barth, Gish Jen, Ann Beattie, and newcomer Chinelo Okparanta - examining how we get ourselves out and the repercussions that follow. Hindsight is 20/20, but it's what we do moving forward that defines us and - in the best of all worlds - redeems us.

Claire Messud
Claire Messud

Claire Messud

Claire Messud’s bestselling novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a book of novellas, The Hunters (2001), and a memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times, among other publications. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020. Her new novel, This Strange Eventful History, will be published by W.W. Norton in May, 2024.

John Freeman
John Freeman

John Freeman

John Freeman is the founder of the literary annual Freeman’s. The author and editor of eleven books, he lives in New York City, where he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. His latest book is the poetry collection, Wind, Trees. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Orion, and Zyzzyva. Each month he hosts Atla magazine's California Book Club, an online discussion of a new Golden State classic.

Photo Credit: Copper Canyon

Harvard Book Store
1256 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA 02138

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