Join us today, 2 PM (EST) for a virtual conversation with Chris Benfey and Benjamin Taylor

Drawing of Chris Benfey by Nicholson Baker, photograph of Benjamin Taylor by Alison Wood

We most enthusiastically invite you, on the occasion of concluding our winter reading of Willa Cather’s My Àntonia with critic and literary historian Chris Benfey, to a virtual conversation with Chris along with Benjamin Taylor, author of a recent (short!) biography of Willa Cather, Chasing Bright Medusas. If you were participating with our reading group in the comments you are most especially importuned to come, but you are very much encouraged also if you are just now picking up this thread. It will be a good introduction to a book by which we were all bewitched, with much to say to us in 2024. We will try not to tell inside jokes.

Sunday, March 10, at 2 pm (EST). Register here.

Chris Benfey is the author of five books about the American Gilded Age, including The Great Wave and A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade, and the family memoir Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. He has edited The American Writings of Lafcadio Hearn and the complete poems of Stephen Crane for Library of America and essays on the Iliad by Simone Weil and Rachel Bespaloff for New York Review Classics. 

Benjamin Taylor is also the author of Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth, The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered, Proust: The Search (Jewish Lives), Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay and the novels Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters, Bellow’s There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, and the stories of Susan Sontag, Debriefing.

Ann Kjellberg (moderator) is the founding editor of Book Post.

We will be joined by some of our commenters, including Book Post author

Anthony Domestico

, poet

Dan Sofaer

, and we hope, if he can squeeze it in amongst travels, Peter Meilaender, author of the recent essay in The Bulwark, “Will Cather and the ‘Antique Virtues.’” Let’s meet one another!

We thank our bookselling partner Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, for offering My Àntonia at a discount for the occasion!

Cheer us on with a like, or, better yet, subscribe to Book Post, a newsletter-based book review.

Nicholson Baker’s new book about teaching himself to draw, Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art, will be published in just a few weeks! See his drawings for Book Post at the tag “N Baker Drawing.”