Stranger Than Fiction: Characters as Outsiders: François Beaune & Joshua Ferris

Where: Le Skyroom at FIAF, 22 E 60th Street, New York, NY

Conversation in English between François Beaune (Un homme louche) and Joshua Ferris (The Unnamed and Then We Came to the End)
Moderated by Albert Mobilio, Bookforum editor

Some of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction experience life as strangers, far removed from the “normalcy” of the reader’s situation. Yet these characters, often owing to their unique points of view, turn out to offer acute perceptions of things as they really are. In the case of Beaune’s Un homme louche, such insight is provided through the diaries of a “louche” man; in The Unnamed, Ferris creates a protagonist whose mental disorder drives him to walk to exhaustion.

François Beaune has founded several journals including Louche, Les bonnes nouvelles de Jacques Dauphin, and the collective zine Gonzo. He is the author of the theatrical piece Victoria, which recently premiered in Lyon, where he lives.

Joshua Ferris’s first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and it was a National Book Award finalist. It has been translated into twenty-four languages. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Best New American Voices, and the Iowa Review. He lives in New York.

Bookforum editor Albert Mobilio is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award. His books of poetry include The Geographics, Me with Animal Towering, and Touch Wood. He is an assistant professor of literary studies at the New School’s Eugene Lang College.