Claudia Rankine & Jess Row Discuss Don’t Let Me Be Lonely & The New Earth
Co-Presented with Books Are Magic, BPL Presents welcomes Claudia Rankine and Jess Row. A brilliant and unsparing examination of America in the early twenty-first century, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely invents a new genre to confront the particular loneliness and rapacious assault on selfhood that our media have inflicted upon our lives. A globe-spanning epic novel about a fractured New York family reckoning with the harms of the past, award-winning author Jess Row’s The New Earth confronts humanity’s uncertain future.
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: Fusing the lyric, the essay, and the visual, Rankine negotiates the enduring anxieties of medicated depression, race riots, divisive elections, terrorist attacks, and ongoing wars—doom scrolling through the daily news feeds that keep us glued to our screens and that have come to define our age. First published in 2004, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a hauntingly prescient work, one that has secured a permanent place in American literature. This new edition is presented in full color with updated visuals and text, including a new preface by the author, and matches the composition of Rankine’s best-selling and award-winning Citizen and Just Us as the first book in her acclaimed American trilogy. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is a crucial guide to surviving a fractured and fracturing American consciousness—a book of rare and vital honesty, complexity, and presence. Buy the book from Books Are Magic here.
The New Earth: For fifteen years, the Wilcoxes have been a family in name only. Though never the picture of happiness, they once seemed like a typical white Jewish clan from the Upper West Side. But in the early 2000s, two events ruptured the relationships between them. First, Naomi revealed to her children that her biological father was actually Black. In the aftermath, college-age daughter Bering left home to become a radical peace activist in Palestine’s West Bank, where she was killed by an Israeli Army sniper. Buy the book from Books Are Magic here.
Additional copies will be available for purchase from Books Are Magic at the event.
Participants
Claudia Rankine is a poet, essayist, and playwright. She is the author of the celebrated and best-selling trilogy of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Citizen, and Just Us. In 2016, Rankine co-founded the Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). She is a MacArthur Fellow and professor of creative writing at New York University.
Jess Row is the author of five books, most recently The New Earth and a collection of essays, White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination. He teaches writing at NYU and lives in New York City and Vermont.
BPL Presents programs are made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
