Le Conversazioni: An Evening with Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates — author of over 50 novels — sits down with Antonio Monda at the NY Historical Society for a conversation about her life, career, and boundary-pushing work.
Why we picked this
Oates has published more than 50 novels across 60-plus years, and there are few writers alive who've taken as many formal and thematic risks. A conversation punctuated by film clips, moderated by the director of the Rome Film Festival — not a standard author event.
Joyce Carol Oates is among the most prolific and formally daring American writers of the past century — the author of more than 50 novels, dozens of volumes of short stories, poetry, and criticism, winner of the National Book Award and multiple other honors, shortlisted for the Booker. At 87, she remains active and provocative. This evening brings her into conversation with Antonio Monda, artistic director of the Le Conversazioni literary festival and former director of the Rome Film Festival, in a format that interweaves film clips with conversation.
Le Conversazioni is known for its intimate, intellectually serious approach to author conversations. Monda’s background in cinema gives the evenings a distinctive texture — less a reading event, more a sustained dialogue about a writer’s imaginative life, punctuated by visual reference points. Oates’s deep engagement with American violence, gender, class, and psychological extremity gives the conversation plenty of territory.
The event takes place at the New-York Historical Society in partnership with Dazzle Communications. Tickets are $35 ($25 for members).