Sunday 12th May at 7pm
If you're not already on the guest list please leave your full name and email address in the comments box at the end of this blog. I'll be in touch.
This month's free online gathering features the author Jake Goldsmith, publisher Charles Boyle and translator Kathleen Shields, who will be reading from and discussing two new books, neither of which can be easily categorised, both of which deserve your attention!
Jake Goldsmith lives in Suffolk, England. He is an author with cystic fibrosis and a list of other chronic health conditions. His writing mainly focuses on the phenomenology of illness, philosophy, and how illness defines one’s experiences.
His second book, published on 1st May 2024, is a collection of essays entitled In Hospital Environments.
https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/in_hospital_environments/ This gathering is to celebrate the UK launch.
In these essays—dealing variously with illness and disability, writing and reading, liberty and apathy, distrust and expertise, Raymond Aron and liberalism, love and grief, and, not least, a beloved cat—Jake Goldsmith demonstrates the radical honesty at the root of philosophy.
“This is the sound of honest thinking in extremis.”
—Ray Davis, pseudopodium.org
Order In Hospital Environments here @asterism_books and elsewhere https://i.mtr.cool/skidllxcrx
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In the second part of the programme we'll be joined by publisher
Charles Boyle and (we hope) the translator
Kathleen Shields, who will be discussing and reading from
Jean Follain's Paris 1935, published in April by CB editions.
This is an intimate, multi-layered portrait of the capital where he has been living for ten years, a celebration of what a city is at a point in time: priests and prostitutes and poets, shop assistants and shoplifters, immigrants and war-wounded invalids, royalists and revolutionaries, women, men and children all work and play and dream in these streets.
“Whether in poetry or prose, Follain is one of the great modern French writers, a secret garden waiting to be discovered by the curious. The publication of the first English edition of Paris, so nimbly translated by Kathleen Shields, is cause for joy.”
– Stephen Romer
Jean Follain (1903–71) was born in Canisy, Normandy. After studying law at Caen, he worked as a judge while pursuing a literary career. He published several poetry collections, including Exister (1947) and Espaces d’instants (1971), as well as prose works about places, Paris (1935), Canisy (1942) and Chef-lieu (1950). Follain knew Éluard and Aragon and was a close friend of Max Jacob. He is often linked with the poets Francis Ponge, Eugène Guillevic and Philippe Jaccottet.
Kathleen Shields taught English at French universities (Paris and Caen) and worked on large bilingual dictionary projects in France and England. For many years she lectured in French at Maynooth University, where she specialised in teaching translation. She is the author of publications in translation studies and literature and of review essays in the Dublin Review of Books. She lives in Dublin.
Charles Boyle needs no introduction!
Join Jake, Charles, Kathleen and myself on Sunday 12th May at 7pm UK time.
These are dark times. Keep the lights on!
