LITERATURE AND CULTURE SEMINAR - Caleb Crain, author of Necessary Errors

Date: 

Thursday, April 3, 2014, 4:15pm

Location: 

CGIS S-354, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, 1730 Cambridge Street

Caleb Crain will give a reading from his novel Necessary Errors, set in Prague a year after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Necessary Errors charts the experiences abroad of Harvard graduate Jacob Putnam as he explores the new worlds of East Central Europe after the fall of Communism. Crain beautifully captures the experience of looking for oneself in another country --  "the chance encounters that grow into lasting, unforgettable experiences and the surprises of our first ventures into a foreign world" -- in one of the finest expatriate novels of recent years.  Necessary Errors was named one of the best books of 2013 (Slate, Wall Street Journal) and has been called "remarkable" (The New York Times) and "a new model for contemporary fiction" (Slate).

Novelist, literary critic, and scholar Caleb Crain has contributed to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and is the author of the novel Necessary Errors (Penguin, 2013), the critical study American Sympathy (Yale, 2001), and the blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything (steamthing.com).

His reading will be followed by a discussion with Jonathan Bolton, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures.

Sposored by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures