Join Jew­ish Book Coun­cil for a very spe­cial con­ver­sa­tion between Nicole Krauss and Jere­my Dauber about Nicole’s new book, To Be a Man. Buy tick­ets here!

About this Event

The tick­et price includes a signed copy of To Be a Man: Sto­ries, ful­filled by inde­pen­dent book­store part­ner Books are Mag­ic. Per­son­al­ized copies are available.

Addi­tion­al add-ons will be avail­able at check­out, includ­ing Nicole Krauss’s For­est Dark, Jere­my Dauber’s Jew­ish Com­e­dy: A Seri­ous His­to­ry and May­hem and Mad­ness: Chron­i­cles of a Teenaged Supervil­lain, and the fourth vol­ume of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil’s lit­er­ary jour­nal Paper Brigade (pre­vi­ous vol­umes can be pur­chased here).

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In one of her strongest works of fic­tion yet, Nicole Krauss plunges fear­less­ly into the strug­gle to under­stand what it is to be a man and what it is to be a woman, and the aris­ing ten­sions that have exist­ed from the very begin­ning of time. Set in our con­tem­po­rary moment, and mov­ing across the globe from Switzer­land, Japan, and New York City to Tel Aviv, Los Ange­les, and South Amer­i­ca, the sto­ries in To Be a Man fea­ture male char­ac­ters as fathers, lovers, friends, chil­dren, seduc­ers, and even a lost hus­band who may nev­er have been a hus­band at all.

The way these sto­ries mir­ror one oth­er and res­onate is beau­ti­ful, with a bal­ance so fine­ly tuned that the book almost feels like a nov­el. Echoes ring through stages of life: aging par­ents and new-born babies; young women’s com­ing of age and the new­found, some­what bewil­der­ing sex­u­al pow­er that accom­pa­nies it; gen­er­a­tional gaps and unex­pect­ed deliv­er­ies of strange new leas­es on life; mys­tery and won­der at a life lived or a future wait­ing to unfold. To Be a Man illu­mi­nates with a fierce, unwa­ver­ing light the forces dri­ving human exis­tence: sex, pow­er, vio­lence, pas­sion, self-dis­cov­ery, grow­ing old­er. Pro­found, poignant, and bril­liant, Krauss’s sto­ries are at once star­tling and deeply mov­ing, but always reveal­ing of all-too-human weak­ness and strength.

Nicole Krauss is the author of the nov­els For­est Dark, Great House, The His­to­ry of Love, and Man Walks Into a Room. Her work has appeared in the New York­er, Harper’s, Esquire, and The Best Amer­i­can Short Sto­ries, and her books have been trans­lat­ed into more than thir­ty-five lan­guages. She is cur­rent­ly the inau­gur­al writer-in-res­i­dence at Colum­bia University’s Mind, Brain, and Behav­ior Insti­tute. She lives in Brook­lyn, New York.

Jere­my Dauber is a pro­fes­sor of Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture and Amer­i­can stud­ies at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, where he direct­ed the university’s Insti­tute for Israel and Jew­ish Stud­ies for ten years. He is the author of sev­er­al non-fic­tion books; the last two, The Worlds of Sholem Ale­ichem and Jew­ish Com­e­dy: A Seri­ous His­to­ry, were both final­ists for the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil’s Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award. On a less seri­ous side, Jere­my is also the author of a young adult nov­el, May­hem and Mad­ness: Chron­i­cles of a Teenaged Supervil­lain, which is com­ing out in paper­back in three weeks (and avail­able for pre-order!).