When Everything Falls Apart, How Does the Heart Survive?

Do you believe in the revolutionary power of literature? So do we. Since 2015, Bay Area Book Festival has featured the boldest and most brilliant literary voices in conversations about issues that matter, with a focus on justice and diversity. We’re a world-class literary extravaganza taking place each year over two days in Downtown Berkeley.

Bay Area Book Festival

When Everything Falls Apart, How Does the Heart Survive? Orville Schell and Yiyun Li on China, Tolstoy, and the Power of Art

In a heartstopping scene from Orville Schell’s My Old Home, trained musician Li Tongshu sits at his piano, eyes closed, playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” as Red Guards storm his home. They’re there to arrest him as a bourgeois traitor, but what they don’t know is that the legacy of Li’s music, and the loyalty of his young son, Little Li, is not easily snuffed out. A journalist and renowned expert on China, Schell has penned his first novel, drawing not only on his deep knowledge of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution but on his conviction that art and love can outlive brutality.Joining him is MacArthur “genius” and award-winning writer Yiyun Li, who came of age during the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown, emigrated to the U.S. at 23 as a young scientist, and eventually took the literary world by storm with her fiction, memoir and essays. Li regularly turned to reading Tolstoy for solace during tough times in her own life, so in the early days of the pandemic she collaborated with A Public Space—the literary magazine, publisher, and academy—to lead a free virtual book club where thousands of people, isolated under shelter-in-place, read War and Peace together over three months. The project, which garnered worldwide attention, now has been made into a book, Tolstoy Together, a guided experience for past and new readers.This Writer to Writer conversation—moderated by award-winning journalist, historian, and author Adam Hochschild, a lifelong friend of Orville’s and a Russian-speaking Tolstoy fan—will explore how art truly can light a lamp in the dark.Each ticket includes private access to the event recording for 10 days following the live event.Just added: join our exclusive <a href="https://www.baybookfest.org/2021schedule/afterparty/" target="_blank" data-msys-clicktrack="0" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">afterparty</a> with Orville, Yiyun, and Adam!

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When Everything Falls Apart, How Does the Heart Survive?

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When Everything Falls Apart, How Does the Heart Survive?

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