September 18: Tom McCarthy—The Threshold and the Ledger
Presented by 192 Books, Tom McCarthy in conversation with Jamieson Webster about The Threshold and the Ledger (Notting Hill Editions, 2025)
This event will take place in person at 192 Books at 192 10th Ave on Thursday, September 18th at 7:00 PM ET. Seating is limited and will be first come, first served.
Books will be available for sale after the conversation.
Tom McCarthy—The Threshold and the Ledger (Notting Hill Editions, 2025)
Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the 20th century’s most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms—the eponymous threshold and ledger—and takes off on a line of flight: through the works of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho, and Shakespeare. Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary-state? A condition of ecstasy, standing outside of oneself? With identity ruptured and surpassed, how and by whom might such experience be recorded? Appearing on the eve of Bachmann’s centenary year, McCarthy’s book argues for the centrality of her vision to the very act of literature itself.
Photo by Christian Werner
Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages and adapted for cinema, theatre, and radio. He is recipient of the Believer Book Award and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, an Internationaler Literaturpreis Finalist, and a two-time Booker Prize Finalist. He is also author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and of the essay collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish. His latest novel, The Making of Incarnation, was published in 2021. Since 2022 he has held the position of Miller Scholar at the Santa Fe Institute. Born in Scotland, he is now a Swedish citizen, and lives in Berlin.
Photo by Roe Ethridge
Jamieson Webster is a psychoanalyst in New York City. She teaches at The New School for Social Research and is on the board and faculty of the Pulsion Institute for Psychoanalysis. She is the author most recently of On Breathing (Catapult, 2025), as well as Disorganisation & Sex (Divided, 2021), Conversion Disorder (Columbia, 2018), and Stay, Illusion! with Simon Critchley (Vintage, 2013).