Don’t Stop Until All Your Enemies Are Dead!

IN THE LATEST ISSUE OF BOOKFORUM, Christian Lorentzen argues that careerism has become the dominant style in American fiction. Where once authors might have been radicals, shamans, recluses, or just plain cranks, today they spend as much time on public relations, jockeying for status, and literary good citizenship as they do on their work. Does this constant state of career management change the prose on the page? What comes after careerism?

Join us as Christian Lorentzen, Merve Emre, Jane Hu, and Karan Mahajan debate professionalism, self-mythology, and how to make a living—and a life—as an author today.

Moderated by Michael Miller, editor-in-chief of Bookforum.

NOTE: This Zoom event can be accessed via the "View the Event" button in the confirmation email as well as in the reminder email, which will be sent on the day of the event. You can also join us from this page, where the meeting link will be accessible at 7pm on April 1st.

Merve Emre is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, The Ferrante Letters, and The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker. A professor at the University of Oxford, she is currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Jane Hu is a writer and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Nation, The Ringer, and other publications.

Christian Lorentzen is a critic in Brooklyn. He’s a former editor at the London Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, the New York Observer, and the New Leader.

Karan Mahajan grew up in New Delhi, India, and moved to the US for college. He is the author of the novels Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs, which was a finalist for the 2016 National Book Awards. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and the New Republic.