Join us for a lively and in-depht conversation on Gide’s novel Morasses with poet and translator Tadzio Koelb, and novelists John Reed and Edmund White. Morasses tells the story of a dilettante in 1890s Paris who takes up writing so that he won’t appear completely idle, but who nonetheless remains completely idle. Morasseswas written specifically to mock the Symbolists, but its lessons are not limited to any time or school. Indeed, Gide used the novel to take swipes at Romanticism and Aestheticism, as well, and there are surely many artists today who could recognize themselves in this bitter satire of artistic life in a decadent urban society.

“[Morasses] is a grandparent to My Struggle by Karl Ove Knaussgaard, only much funnier.” —Christopher Bram

André Gide (1869—1951) was one of France’s most controversial and influential writers. A novelist, playwright, critic, essayist, translator, and co-founder of La Nouvelle Revue Française, he was awarded theNobel Prize for Literature, and became the first living author to see his collected work published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Following trips to Africa and the USSR, he published anti-colonial and anti-Soviet works that earned him enemies of every political stripe. The Catholic Church placed his work on its Index of Forbidden Books shortly following his death, claiming, “He made of his sin a coefficient (and not the least) part of his fame.”

Translator Tadzio Koelb‘s fiction and poetry have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail,>kill author, The Madison Review, The Brooklyner, and Sakura Review, among others. Tadzio regularly reviews fiction, non-fiction, and art for a number of publications on both sides of the Atlantic, including The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Guardian,and his short critical biography of Lawrence Durrell appeared in Scribner’s Sons’ British Writers series. He is deputy managing editor of The Brooklyn Quarterlyand teaches creative writing at Rutgers.

John Reed, who provided the introduction to this translation, is the author of four novels: A Still Small Voice, Snowball’s Chance, The Whole, and All the World’s a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare. His fifth book, Tales of Woe, is a collection of twenty-five stories, chronicling true stories of abject misery. His writing has appeared in Intercourse, The Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, Paper Magazine, Artforum, Bomb Magazine, Playboy, Out Magazine, Art in America, thePEN Poetry Series, the Los Angeles Times, The Paris Review, The Believer,The Rumpus, The Daily Beast,Gawker, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, ElectricLit, among others. He is a two-term member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and on the faculty at The New School University and The New York Arts Program.

Edmund White has written some twenty-five books. He is perhaps best known for his biography of French writer Jean Genet, for which he won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a trilogy of autobiographical novels—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony. His novel, The Married Man, takes place in France, the United States and Morocco, and deals with the intimate psychological repercussions of AIDS. He has written brief lives of Marcel Proust and Arthur Rimbaud and a book about unconventional Paris called The Flaneur. His most recent published works of fiction are Chaos, Hotel de Dream, Jack Holmes and His Friend and a recent non-fiction book City Boy, a memoir about New York in the 1970s. His memoir, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris, came out in 2014. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and an officer in the French Order of Arts and Letters and a winner of the France-Amériques award. He teaches writing at Princeton and lives in New York City.

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