Peter Coviello & Lindsay Reckson: Is There God After Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things
PETER COVIELLO & LINDSAY RECKSON
IS THERE GOD AFTER PRINCE? DISPATCHES FROM AN AGE OF LAST THINGS
Thursday 12/7 at 6:00pm
Labyrinth Books
Peter Coviello’s new collection of essays considers what it means to love art, culture, and people in an age of accelerating disaster. Join us for a presentation and discussion.
This is a book about loving things in the shadow of a felt, looming disaster. Through lyrical, funny, heart-wrenching essays, Peter Coviello considers pieces of culture across a fantastic range, setting them inside the vivid scenes of friendship, dispute, romance, talk, and loss, where they enter our lives. Alongside him, we re-encounter movies like The Shining, shows like The Sopranos; videos; poems; novels by Sam Lipsyte, Sally Rooney, and Paula Fox; as well as songs by Joni Mitchell, Gladys Knight, Steely Dan, Pavement, and the much-mourned saint of Minneapolis, Prince.
Navigating an overwhelming feeling that Coviello calls “endstrickenness,” he asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, when so much seems to be shambling toward collapse. Balancing comedy and anger, exhilaration and sorrow, Coviello illuminates the strange ways the things we cherish help us to hold on to life and to its turbulent joys. Is There God after Prince? shows us what twenty-first-century criticism can be, and how it might speak to us, in a time of ruin, in an age of “Last Things.”
Peter Coviello is the author of five previously acclaimed books, including Tomorrow’s Parties; the memoir Long Players; and Make Yourselves Gods. His essays have appeared in Frieze, Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Raritan, Elle, and Believer, among other publications. He is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Lindsay Reckson is Professor and Chair of English at Haverford College. She works at the intersection of American and African-American literary studies, performance studies, media studies, and religion. She is the author of Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature. Her current book project, Notes on Gesture, is a series of essays exploring how minimal or routine gestures become sites of ethical inquiry in times of attenuated political possibility.
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This event is co-sponsored by Labyrinth Books.