Dave Eggers and Andrew Sean Greer
Contrapposto and Villa Coco: A Discussion with Two Novelists
EVENT NOTES
Doors for this event will open at 6:30 PM. Town Hall events are approximately 75 minutes long.
From bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Dave Eggers comes his new novel, Contrapposto, about prairie-born Cricket Dib, who has no particular prospects or ambitions until he realizes he can draw. He meets a girl: Olympia Argyros, who is captivating, brilliant, and far more worldly. Olympia recognizes his talent and convinces him to deface a popular playground. Under her direction, Cricket acts willingly, and thus begins a sixty-five-year entwining between the two, encompassing friendship, working partnership, and love. They go to art school and then navigate the art world for the next fifty years, together and apart.
Their love changes over the decades, but their commitment to each other and their search for meaning in the making of art never wanes. Contrapposto is not only about a relationship but about art and what it means to be an artist. The novel spans the globe, from New York to Thailand, Indiana to Paris, and follows Cricket and Olympia through sickness and health, war and death.
Contrapposto examines the rules and market of the art world, but it is mainly a story of two friends who believe they can change that world and bring new meaning to it.
Joining Eggers this evening is his friend, fellow novelist Andrew Sean Greer, whose latest work Villa Coco follows a nameless narrator, an assistant to a wealthy widow. He is charged with the task of archiving art, but is pulled into far more complicated schemes as he tries to reunite his employer with the love of her life before it is too late.
Be sure to visit Town Hall Seattle for a conversation that explores the power of art and of human connection.
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Dave Eggers is the author of many books, among them The Eyes and the Impossible, The Circle, The Monk of Mokha, Heroes of the Frontier, A Hologram for the King, and What Is the What. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing company, and co-founder of 826 Valencia, a youth writing center that has inspired over 70 similar organizations worldwide. Eggers is winner of the American Book Award, the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Award for Education, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the TED Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the 2024 John Newbery Medalist, for the most distinguished contribution to children’s literature for The Eyes and the Impossible. Eggers is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of seven works of fiction, including Pulitzer Prize winner Less and its companion Less Is Lost. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O. Henry award for short fiction, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in Venice.
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