Daniel Levin Becker presents Laurent Mauvignier's "The Birthday Party" with Merve Emre

Translator Daniel Levin Becker joins us to present his new translation of French author Laurent Mauvignier's thrilling and propulsive novel "The Birthday Party" (out now from Transit Books), in conversation with scholar and critic Merve Emre. This virtual event took place on Zoom. To purchase a copy of the book (and support Community Bookstore): www.communityb...
About the book:
“A real-time study in crippling self-consciousness, the fragility of normalcy, and the reality of violence.”-The New York Times
Buried deep in rural France, little remains of the isolated hamlet of the Three Lone Girls, save a few houses and a curiously assembled quartet: Patrice Bergogne, inheritor of his family’s farm; his wife, Marion; their daughter, Ida; and their neighbor, Christine, an artist. While Patrice plans a surprise for his wife’s fortieth birthday, inexplicable events start to disrupt the hamlet’s quiet existence: anonymous, menacing letters, an unfamiliar car rolling up the driveway. And as night falls, strangers stalk the houses, unleashing a nightmarish chain of events.
Told in rhythmic, propulsive prose that weaves seamlessly from one consciousness to the next over the course of a day, Laurent Mauvignier’s "The Birthday Party" is a deft unraveling of the stories we hide from others and from ourselves, a gripping tale of the violent irruptions of the past into the present, written by a major contemporary French writer.
About our guests:
Daniel Levin Becker is the author of "Many Subtle Channels" and "What’s Good," the translator of books including Georges Perec’s "La Boutique Obscure" and Eduardo Berti’s "An Ideal Presence," and the youngest member of the Oulipo.
Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of "Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America," "The Ferrante Letters," and "The Personality Brokers." She is finishing a book titled "Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities" and writing a book called "Love and Other Useless Pursuits." She is a contributing writer at the New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. From 2022-23, she will be a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.