Book launch: A Writer of Our Time: The Life & Writings of John Berger (2018, Verso)
Author Joshua Sperling in conversation with David Levi Strauss
Thursday, December 6
132 West 21st Street, 6th Floor
6:30 PM
Free and open to the public
John Berger (1926-2017) was one of the most influential voices of postwar Europe: by turns an art critic, a polemicist, a visual theorist, a storyteller. Built around a series of personal watersheds, A Writer of Our Time traces Berger’s development from his roots as an art student and cultural cold warrior in 1950s London, through the heady days of the New Left—when the revolutions were not only political but sexual and artistic—to his reinvention as a rural storyteller and the spiritual lodestar of the anti-globalization movement. As much a portrait of an age as a person, the book ultimately asks: how can we preserve the multiple layers of our loyalties during moments of immense political pressure?
Joshua Sperling was born in New York City and grew up in California. His writing has appeared in the Brooklyn Rail , Guernica, Film Quarterly, Jump Cut, and Bulle
David Levi Strauss is the author of Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). He is Chair of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Quijote Talks take place in our library on 21st Street, between 6th and 7th Avenues in Chelsea, usually on Thursdays at 6:30 pm. Named after our favorite after-lecture hangout, El Quijote in the Chelsea Hotel, and inspired by the knight errant himself, this new series consists of pointed talks and discussions about relevant pasts and possible futures. See our full lecture series archive here.
