Robert Glück in Conversation with Andrew Durbin

The legendary author of Margery Kempe and About Ed visits Foyles to mark the re-release of two classics of queer American literature, Jack the Modernist and Purple Men 2000.

Sensual and sensational, Robert Glück’s Jack the Modernist is a classic of postmodern fiction, republished in a new edition by NYRB, portraying the slow disintegration of a love affair set in the early 1980s.Originally published as a short story in Glück’s 2003 collection Denny Smith, Purple Men 2000 is a queer Mrs Dalloway, tracing a day in the life of Trent and Daryl, a couple living together in San Francisco in the early nineties.

Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, critic, potter, and editor. In the late 1970s, he and Bruce Boone founded New Narrative, a literary movement of self-reflexive storytelling that combines essay, lyric, and autobiography in one work. Glück is the author of the story collections Elements and Denny Smith; the novels Jack the Modernist, Margery Kempe, and About Ed (all published by New York Review Books); and a volume of collected essays, Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. Glück has served as codirector at Small Press Traffic, as an associate editor at Lapis Press, and as the director of the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he is an emeritus professor.

Glück will be in conversation with Andrew Durbin, whose fiction, criticism and poetry have appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review and elsewhere. His dual biography of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, The Wonderful World that Almost Was, is published by Granta in April. He lives in London and is the editor-in-chief of Frieze magazine.

The discussion will be followed by an audience Q&A and book signing. Your ticket includes a complimentary glass of wine.

Image Credits: Glück by Xavi Permanyer and Durbin by Suzannah Pettigrew