Dave Eggers: Contrapposto
Dave Eggers discusses Contrapposto, a darkly comic novel tracing sixty-five years in the lives of two artists navigating friendship, love, and the contradictions of artistic integrity.
Why we picked this
Eggers spent six decades of fictional time inside the lives of two artists to ask what artistic friendship actually costs and survives. It is his most formally ambitious novel, and Chicago is where it belongs.
At Old Town School of Folk Music’s Maurer Concert Hall, Dave Eggers discusses Contrapposto, his newest novel — a darkly comic tale set in San Francisco’s elite art world that traces sixty-five years in the intertwined lives of two artists, Cricket Dib and Olympia Argyros. The evening explores what the book examines: friendship, love, the pursuit of art, and the contradictions between artistic integrity and the demands of capitalism. A book signing follows, and most tickets include a copy of Contrapposto.
Eggers is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and one of the most productive writers in contemporary American literature — founder of McSweeney’s, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle, The Every, and more than a dozen other books of fiction and nonfiction. Contrapposto is his most sustained fictional investigation of what art and friendship actually survive across a lifetime, written with the social commentary and deeply human storytelling that characterizes his best work.
The Maurer Concert Hall at Old Town School is an unusually good venue for a literary evening — intimate enough that the author’s voice carries real weight, and presented in partnership with the Chicago Humanities Festival for a conversation that goes well beyond the standard book-tour format. The event also arrives the day before Marilyn Crispell’s gallery performance at the Art Institute, making the June 10–11 stretch one of the stronger two-day arts sequences in the spring festival.