Wednesday, November 7th @6pm | Cornelia Street Café
Igor Webb will read from his new book, Christopher Smart’s Cat about displacement, flight, settlement and resettlement, about “life and death in the Pannonian plain,” appropriating the old Roman name for today’s Central Europe in order to identify the geographical place as also the metaphorical center, the crossroads, of twentieth century history and culture. Told from the vantage point of those, like the author, who were children in the Holocaust, the book is a beautifully crafted meditation on great writers—from Virginia Woolf to W.G. Sebald, from Philip Roth to Danilo Kiš—as well as a gripping tale alive with remarkable characters. None more remarkable than Christopher Smart (1722-1771), whose ecstatic verse mysteriously provides the book with its title.
The reading will be followed by a conversation with novelist, John Matthias.
IGOR WEBB’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Hudson Review, American Scholar, and the Notre Dame Review, among others. Christopher Smart’s Cat (Dos Madres Press, 2018) is his fourth book. He is the Director of the Adelphi University Creative Writing MFA Program.
JOHN MATTHIAS, author of over 30 books of poetry, fiction, memoir, essay, and drama, is Editor-at-Large of the Notre Dame Review.