IN-PERSON | Elisa Gabbert to discuss and celebrate the release of Any Person Is the Only Self

Join the Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith for an in-store event with Elisa Gabbert to discuss and celebrate the release of her new collection of essays Any Person Is the Only Self. She will be in conversation with writer Laura van den Berg.

Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichéd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics.

Elisa Gabbert is the author of seven collections of poetry, essays, and criticism, most recently Any Person Is the Only Self, Normal Distance, and The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays. She writes the On Poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Believer, and elsewhere. She lives in Providence.

Moderator Laura van den Berg was born and raised in Florida. She is the author of six works of fiction, most recently State of Paradise. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bard Fiction Prize, and is a two-time finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Laura is currently a Senior Lecturer on Fiction at Harvard. She lives in the Hudson Valley.