The Invisible Dog Art Center, in partnership with Books Are Magic is thrilled to present an evening of reading, as part of Nafas, an exhibition and a festival celebrating the union between food and art.
Guest writers: Garth Greenwell, Raven Leilani, Brandon Taylor and Sanaë Lemoine
Introduction and moderation: Adam Dalva
The senses are a crucial aspect of great literature - and nothing is more powerfully sense-evoking than food, which moves beyond taste into the realms of smell, texture, sight, and sound. And food is especially potent in writing because it is also the crucial sensory aspect of memory.
In the case of the lead of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, of course, a humble madeleine is what thrusts the lead back into a 3000-page reverie. It’s not that the madeleine itself is particularly remarkable—it’s redolent of childhood walks, a beloved grandmother, and the most shameful secrets.
Food is also politics—the war in Ukraine is also a war of grain shortage. Food is body, with all its attendant dysmorphias and shames. Food is joyous cultural representation, but it can also represent colonialism, or income disparity. The choicest vitamins are counterbalanced by the vilest carcinogens. Garth Greenwell, Raven Leilani, Sanaë Lemoine and Brandon Taylor are sensualists in the best sense of the word, and they use food brilliantly in their writing. Adam Dalva brings them to the communal table.
Adam Dalva’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. He is the Senior Fiction Editor of Guernica Magazine. Adam serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, is the Books Editor of Words Without Borders, and teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.
Adam is a graduate of NYU's Fiction MFA Program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop Fellow. He is a writer-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Invisible Dog Art Center, and has received fellowships from Scotland’s Hawthornden Castle, Iceland’s Gullkistan, the Vermont Studio Center, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Wildacres. His graphic novel, Olivia Twist, was published by Dark Horse in 2019.
@adamdalva
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into fourteen languages. His new book of fiction, Cleanness, was published in January 2020. A finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, it was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and France’s Prix Sade (Deuxième sélection). Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. It is being translated into eight languages. Greenwell is also the co-editor, with R.O. Kwon, of the anthology KINK, which appeared in February 2021, was named a New York Times Notable Book, won the inaugural Joy Award from the #MarginsBookstore Collective, and became a national bestseller. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and Harper’s, among others. The recipient of honors including a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 Vursell Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Greenwell lives in Iowa City with his partner, the poet Luis Muñoz.
@ggreenwell
Raven Leilani is an American writer whose debut novel, Luster, was published in 2020. Her writing, she has said, is influenced by her experiences and her love of art, poetry, comic books and music. Leilani grew up in a family of artists in the Bronx and later moved to a suburb of Albany, New York. She attended an art high school, aiming for a career as a visual artist. Her first job after college was as an imaging specialist at Ancestry.com., but several jobs, and several years, later she enrolled in New York University's MFA program for creative writing. At NYU she studied under Zadie Smith and with writers Katie Kitamura and Jonathan Safran Foer. Leilani's writing has also been published in Granta, Yale Review, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, The Cut, and New England Review, among other publications.
@raven_leilani
Sanaë Lemoine is the author of The Margot Affair and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow. She was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, raised in France and Australia, and now lives in New York City. She received an MFA in fiction from Columbia University, where she taught essay writing and was a writing consultant at the Writing Center. Since then, she has worked as a recipe writer and editor, and most recently as a cookbook editor at Phaidon Press and Martha Stewart Books.
@sanaelemoine
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was a finalist for the 2020 Booker Prize, The National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the 2021 Young Lions Fiction Award, and was named a NYT Editors’ Choice and NYT Notable Book. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, won the 2022 Story Prize and was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
@brandonlgtaylor