Nick McDonell has written eleven books, ranging from novels (the first of which he wrote at the age of seventeen) to nonfiction accounts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With his latest book, a memoir called Quiet Street, McDonell turns his gaze inward, taking his own upbringing in a wealthy New York family as his subject. Among other institutional contexts, he considers the private all-boys school that he attended in Manhattan, his time as a student at Harvard, and his summers spent at the Devon Yacht Club. Across these accounts, McDonell reflects upon the machinations of privilege, using his own life as a prism through which to understand larger dynamics of class, race, and inequality. He will appear in conversation at the Library with photographer and filmmaker Roopa Gogineni.
About the speakers:
Nick McDonell has published eleven books. His work has been translated into 23 languages and appeared on bestseller lists around the world. He is the author of the novels Twelve, The Third Brother, An Expensive Education, and The Council of Animals, as well as a work of political theory, The Civilization of Perpetual Movement, and five books of reportage on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including The Bodies in Person. He has contributed reporting and essays to Harper’s Magazine, The London Review of Books, Libération, The Paris Review, newyorker.com, and TIME, among other publications. He has also written for film and television.
As a reporter, McDonell has covered the wars in Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine. He helped found The Zomia Center, which is dedicated to the study of ungoverned and semi-governed regions known as non-state spaces. He grew up in New York City and studied literature at Harvard and international relations at St. Anthony’s College, Oxford.
Roopa Gogineni is a filmmaker, photographer and curator from West Virginia whose work considers historical memory and modes of resistance. After a decade in Nairobi she is now based in Paris. Suddenly TV, her latest film about magical thinking and revolution, was nominated for the IDA Awards and earned jury prizes at SXSW, IndieLisboa, and Kasseler Dokfest. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Oxford and teaches at Parsons Paris.
