Michael Cunningham and Daniel Mendelsohn in Conversation

Every season we bring together diverse literary figures to chat informally, often intimately, about their work and its place in the culture. This year we are privileged to lend our stage to Ptown’s own Michael Cunningham, winner of numerous prizes including a Pulitzer, and the internationally best-selling essayist, critic, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn. Inspired by Mendelsohn’s acclaimed memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic and Cunningham’s fictional works that have paid homage to Woolf, Whitman, and even classic fairy tales, the two authors will discuss how writers turn consciously to literature itself as a way of broadening their own horizons.

Michael Cunningham is the author of the novels A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and blood, The Hours (winner of the Pen/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize), The Snow Queen, Specimen Days, and By Nightfall, as well as the nonfiction book Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown. His most recent book is A Wild Swan and Other Tales (illustrated by Yuko Shimizu). He is a senior lecturer at Yale and lives in New York.

Daniel Mendelsohn is an internationally bestselling author, critic, essayist, and translator. His books include An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize (U.K.) and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Newsday, Library Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Kirkus, and The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), which won the National Books Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors. A member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, he teaches literature at Bard College.