Wednesday, September 29, 7pm CT
Left Bank Books' Facebook Live Page or YouTube Page
Left Bank Books & A Public Space welcome Award-Winning AuthorAbout Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li
From the acclaimed author of Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, a book about the art of reading. In Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace, Yiyun Li invites you to travel with her through Tolstoy's novel--and with fellow readers around the world who joined her for an online book club and an epic journey during a pandemic year.
"I've found that the more uncertain life is," Yiyun Li writes, "the more solidity and structure War and Peace provides." Tolstoy Together expands the epic novel into a rich conversation about literature and ways of reading, with contributions from Garth Greenwell, Elliott Holt, Carl Phillips, Tom Drury, Sara Majka, Alexandra Schwartz, and hundreds of fellow readers.
Along with Yiyun Li's daily reading journal and a communal journal with readers' reflections--with commentary on craft and technique, historical context, and character studies, Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace includes a schedule and framework, providing a daily motivating companion for Tolstoy's novel and a reading practice for future books.
"Among the many pleasures of the #TolstoyTogether group, while life has often felt on pause (which has ups and downs to it) seeing how much we've read reminds me I've been traveling all along, and not alone."-- Carl Phillips
"A Public Space initiated a communal reading of Tolstoy's War and Peace under the aegis of the novelist Yiyun Li, with the intention of lifting spirits and establishing a common bond among lovers of good literature."-- Joyce Carol Oates, Wall Street Journal
"The brilliant novelist Yiyun Li has started a War and Peace book club online... at A Public Space. You read 12 pages a day of War and Peace in a whole community of readers. And the next thing you know, you have read the book and the pandemic is over and you have read War and Peace, which is terrific."-- Ann Patchett, the PBS Newshour
About our Speakers
Yiyun Li is the author of seven books, including Where Reasons End, which received the PEN/Jean Stein Award; the essay collection Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life; and the novels The Vagrants and Must I Go. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and Windham-Campbell Prize, among other honors. A contributing editor to A Public Space, she teaches at Princeton University.
Ayana Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is her first novel.
A Public Space is an independent nonprofit publisher of an eponymous award-winning literary, arts, and culture magazine, and A Public Space Books. Under the direction of founding editor Brigid Hughes since 2006, it has been our mission to seek out overlooked and unclassifiable work, and to publish writing from beyond established confines.
All you need to do to participate is log in to your personal Facebook account, go to Left Bank Books' Facebook Live Page, and wait for the livestream to begin on the page (you may need to refresh the page periodically until the stream begins). You may also watch the simulcast on Left Bank's YouTube channel.
