Deborah Levy: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein
Twice Booker-shortlisted novelist Deborah Levy celebrates her new novel in conversation with Josh Cohen at the Purcell Room, Southbank Centre.
Why we picked this
Levy is one of the few novelists who can talk about the art of fiction without making it sound like a craft lecture — her thinking is strange and precise in the same way her prose is. Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst and literary critic, is the right person to push that thinking somewhere interesting.
Deborah Levy has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice — for Swimming Home and Hot Milk — and her autobiographical living memoir trilogy established her as one of the most distinctive prose stylists working in British fiction. Her new novel, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, is her first book-length fiction since the living memoir trilogy, and it arrives trailing real curiosity about where she goes next.
The evening brings her into conversation with Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst, literary critic, and author whose work sits precisely at the intersection of literature and the inner life. That combination — Levy’s restless approach to fiction alongside Cohen’s analytical intelligence — makes it likely the conversation will move well past the book’s plot and into questions that matter.
The talk takes up Levy’s central preoccupation: why the novel matters, and what fiction can do that no other form can. Whether you know her work or are arriving at it here, this is a chance to hear a serious novelist think out loud about her practice at a generative moment.