Dave Eggers and Andrew Sean Greer — Contrapposto and Villa Coco
Two Pulitzer-connected novelists Dave Eggers and Andrew Sean Greer discuss their latest novels about art, friendship, and human connection in a joint Town Hall Seattle conversation.
Why we picked this
Joint appearances by novelists tend to produce conversations that neither would have alone — Eggers and Greer both write about art and friendship with unusual seriousness, and their new books are in close enough dialogue to make the comparison illuminating.
Two of contemporary American fiction’s most reliably ambitious writers share a stage at Town Hall Seattle’s Great Hall for a joint conversation about their newest novels. Dave Eggers, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Circle, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and more than a dozen other books, presents Contrapposto — a novel tracing sixty-five years in the intertwined lives of two artists, Cricket Dib and Olympia Argyros, exploring what art, friendship, and human connection actually survive over a lifetime. Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize winner for Less, presents Villa Coco, in which an unnamed narrator working as assistant to a wealthy widow navigates complicated schemes while attempting to arrange his employer’s reunion with a lost love.
Both novels are preoccupied with art as both subject and method: Eggers from the perspective of visual artists whose long relationship reshapes each other’s work; Greer from the more oblique angle of someone adjacent to wealth and culture who observes without quite belonging. The evening, part of Town Hall’s Oculus Series, brings them together to explore what they share — and what their different approaches to fiction reveal about the questions they’re both circling.
Tickets at $57–$82 include a copy of Contrapposto. The Oculus Series consistently delivers one of Seattle’s better evenings for people who take contemporary fiction seriously.