To mark the publication of his new novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, Peter Carey will participate in a conversation with Claire Messud and Edmund White on Tuesday, April 20th at 7pm in the South Court Auditorium of The New York Public Library.
Parrot and Olivier in America is an irrepressibly funny new novel set in nineteeth-century America featuring an improvisation on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville and the motherless son of an itinerant English engraver. Carey’s conversation with White and Messud will explore the adventure of American democracy. (Read more about the event.)
Tickets are $25 for general admission, but with the discount code PARROT, you may purchase tickets for only $15. Click here to apply the discount.
To learn more about the speakers, read on.
Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943. His first work, The Fat Man in History was published in 1974. He went on to write War Crimes, Bliss, Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda, The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, Jack Maggs, True History of the Kelly Gang, My Life as a Fake, Wrong About Japan, Theft, His Illegal Self, and The Tax Inspector. Illywhacker was short listed for the Booker Prize, while Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang both won it. Oscar and Lucinda was made into a major motion picture starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in 1997. Peter Carey taught at NYU, Princeton, The New School, and Barnard College before he joined Hunter College as the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing in 1993, where he continues to teach.
Claire Messud is the author of When The World Was Steady, The Last Life and The Hunters, which contains two novellas. Her most recent novel, The Emperor’s Children, was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize. Messud has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute and the Humanities Center at Harvard. She writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, and teaches in the MFA program at Hunter College.
Edmund White has written more than twenty books, most recently City Boy, a memoir of New York in the 1970s. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Prize for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other honors, he was named an Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. His best-known novel is A Boy’s Own Story. He teaches writing at Princeton University.