Books & Books and Miami Book Fair present…

An Evening with André Aciman

In conversation with Dani Shapiro

Homo Irrealis

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $27)

Thursday, January 28, 7pm

LIVE via Crowdcast

PURCHASE TICKET + BOOK HERE

The New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works

Irrealis moods are the set of verbal moods that indicate that something is not actually the case or a certain situation or action is not known to have happened . . .

André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what the present tense means to artists who cannot grasp the here and now. Irrealis is not about the present, or the past, or the future, but about what might have been but never was—but could in theory still happen.

From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street, to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, Constantine Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa, and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection of the imagination’s power to shape our memories under time’s seemingly intractable hold.

About the Author:

André Aciman is the author of Find Me, Eight White Nights, Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt, False Papers, Alibis, Harvard Square, and Enigma Variations, and is the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He lives with his wife in Manhattan.

About the Moderator:

Dani Shapiro is the author of the instant New York Times best selling memoir, Inheritance, which was published in January 2019 by Knopf. Her other books include the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion, and five novels including Black & White and Family History.

Along with teaching writing workshops around the world, Dani has taught at Columbia and New York University, and is the cofounder of the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy.

In February of 2019, Dani launched an original podcast, Family Secrets, in collaboration with iHeartMedia. An iTunes Top 10 podcast, the series features stories from guests who—like Dani— have uncovered life-altering and long-hidden secrets from their families’ past.

She lives with her family in Litchfield County, Connecticut.