December 1st: Robert Glück in Conversation with Rainer Diana Hamilton
Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Robert Glück will discuss his new book About Ed with Rainer Diana Hamilton.
This event will take place live at 192 Books at 192 10th Avenue, between 21st and 22nd avenue, on Friday, December 1st at 6:00 PM ET. Seating is on a first come, first served basis. The discussion will be streamed directly on this page. A recording will be archived.
About Ed by Robert Glück (Published by New York Review of Books, 2023)
Bob Glück met Ed Aulerich-Sugai in 1970. Ed was an aspiring artist; Bob wanted to write. They were young men in San Francisco at the high tide of sexual liberation and soon, and for eight years, they were lovers, after which they were friends. Ed was an explorer in the realms of sex. He was beautiful, fragile, exasperating, serious, unassuaged. In 1994 he died of HIV. His dream notebooks became a touchstone for this book, which Glück has been working on for some two decades, while also making his name as a proponent of New Narrative writing and as one of America’s most unusual, venturesome, and lyrical authors. About Ed is about Ed, who remains, as our dead do, both familiar and unknowable, faraway and close. It is about Bob too.
The book is a hybrid, at once fiction and fact, like memory, and it takes in many things through tales of political activism and domestic comedy and fury to questions of art and love and experiences of longing and horror. The book also shifts in register, from the delicate to the analytic, to funny and explicit and heartbroken. It begins in the San Francisco of the early 1980s, when Ed and Bob have been broken up for a while. aIds is spreading, but Ed has yet to receive his diagnosis. It follows him backward through his life with Bob in the 1970s and forward through the harrowing particulars of death. It holds on to him and explores his art. It ends in his dreams.
Robert Glück is the author of more than ten books of poetry and prose, including Reader (Lapis Press, 1989), and, with Bruce Boone, La Fontaine (Black Star Series, 1981). With Camille Roy and Gail Scott, he edited the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Books, 2004), which was based on Narrativity, an online journal they edited. Glück founded the San Francisco-based New Narrative movement with Bruce Boone, Camille Roy, and others in the early 1980s in reaction to Language poetry. New Narrative writing celebrates LGBTQ identity, autobiography, poetic disjunction, critical theory, gossip, pop culture, fable, and sexuality. Glück served as the co-director of Small Press Traffic, a nonprofit literary organization at the center of innovative and experimental writing in San Francisco, California, founded in 1974. He is an emeritus professor at San Francisco State, where he was the director of the Poetry Center. He lives in San Francisco.
Rainer Diana Hamilton is the author of three books—God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse), The Awful Truth (Golias Books), and Okay, Okay (Truck Books)—and four chapbooks. They write poetry, fiction, and criticism about style, crying, shit, kisses, dreams, fainting, writing, and re-reading. You can walk through audio recordings of their dreams in the first-person shooter by Alejandro Miguel Justino Crawford in Diana Hamilton's Dreams (Gauss PDF). Their poetry and criticism have appeared in BOMB, Frieze, Art in America, Lambda Literary, and Social Text Journal, among others. They received their PhD in Comparative Literature from Cornell University, and they currently work as the Director of Baruch College's Writing Center.