To Be a Man: Nicole Krauss with Judith Thurman

Krauss discusses her first story collection, To Be a Man, and the everyday messiness of love, death, sex, power, and alienation that informs her characters' lives.

Set in our contemporary moment, and moving across the globe from Switzerland, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Angeles, and South America, the stories in Nicole Krauss's most recent book find men and women at varying ages and stages of life as they grapple with the forces that define much of human existence: sex, power, violence, passion, self-discovery, and aging. "Krauss's stories capture characters at moments in their lives when they're hungry for experience and open to possibilites," says The New York Times. "And that openness extends to the stories themselves: narratives too urgent and alive for neat plotlines, simplistic resolutions, or easy answers."

Nicole Krauss was a 2009—2010 fellow at the Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She discusses her latest book with author Judith Thurman.

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ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Nicole Krauss is the author of the international bestsellers, Forest Dark, Great House, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize, and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France's Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. In 2007, she was selected as one of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists, and in 2010 she was chosen by The New Yorker for their "Twenty Under Forty" list. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, and her books have been translated into thirty-seven languages. She is currently the first Writer-in-Residence at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University. To Be a Man, her first collection of short stories, will be published in November 2020.

 Judith Thurman is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Non-Fiction; of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, which won the Salon and Los Angeles Times Book Awards for Biography; and of Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, a collection of her essays for The New Yorker, where she has been a contributor since 1987, and a Staff Writer since 2000.

GET THE BOOK
If you have a NYPL library card—or live in New York state and want to apply for one now—you can borrow To Be a Man for free with our e-reader app SimplyE, available for iOS and Android devices. The title is available in accessible formats for community members who do not use standard print. Find out more at: nypl.org/talkingbooks. You can also request this book, and more, for pickup at one of our Grab & Go locations.

Readers everywhere who wish to purchase copies of To Be a Man can do so at The New York Public Library Shop. Proceeds benefit the New York Public Library. Plus, receive a 125th Anniversary tote bag with your purchase!

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Judith Thurman © Curt Richter