New York, NY 10003
USA
Historian Yuri Slezkine and Novelist Amor Towles in Conversation on September 12, 2017
Tuesday, September 12, 2017 at 6:30 pm
The Cooper Union’s Great Hall
7 East 7th Street, between Third and Fourth Avenues
New York, NY 10003
In a free, public event, Yuri Slezkine, author of The House of Government (2017, Princeton University Press) speaks with novelist Amor Towles.
Yuri Slezkine is the Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Jewish Century, which won the National Jewish Book Award, and Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. His latest book, The House of Government, is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. It tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges.
Amor Towles’ first novel, Rules of Civility, published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and was named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books of 2011. His second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, published in 2016, was also a New York Times bestseller, and was named one of the best books of 2016 by the Washington Post, NPR, and more.
The event is free and open to the public but registration is requested.
The Cooper Union’s Great Hall has stood for more than a century as a bastion of free speech and a witness to the flow of American history and ideas. When the Great Hall first opened, it was the largest public gathering space in New York City. Before they were elected, Presidents Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Barack Obama all spoke in the Great Hall. Abraham Lincoln gave his famous “Right Makes Might” speech that propelled him to the White House there. Leading thinkers and numerous historical figures have held the stage including Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain and more. More recently, groups like the UN, PEN America, the Architectural League of New York and more have held events on its stage.
