Book Launch - Brian Goodman: The Nonconformists: American and Czech Writers Across the Iron Curtain
Event description
- Arts and entertainment
- Free
- Open to the public
Author and ASU Professor Brian Goodman shares his latest historical book. In conversation with Sarah Viren.
ABOUT THE BOOK
While American readers were devouring Kafka, Czech writers and translators were eagerly following cultural trends in the United States, importing and creatively appropriating works by Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway. Bridging these two worlds, Goodman reconstructs the journeys of American writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Arthur Miller, Philip Roth and John Updike to Prague, where they established lasting friendships with their Czech counterparts, including Josef Škvorecký, Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, Ludvík Vaculík and Milan Kundera. Even though all these writers were banned after a Soviet-led invasion ended the Prague Spring in 1968, the English-language reception of underground Czech literature would help transform the city of Kafka into an international capital of dissent.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian K. Goodman specializes in American studies, literature and human rights, and dissident cultures and has written for the Los Angeles Review of Books and Public Books. He is assistant professor of English at Arizona State University, where he is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Jewish Studies and the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian and East European Studies.
Link to Changing Hands Phoenix event page:https://www.changinghands.com/event/august2023/brian-goodman