Renowned critic and essayist Louis Menand is the next guest of Meet the Author. The session will take place on November 16, at 6:30 p.m. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Louis Menand brings to Lisbon his most recent book, The Free World – Art and Thought in the Cold War (Elsinore 2023).

A professor at Harvard University, a renowned critic and essayist, thinker and contributor to The New Yorker magazine, Louis Menand is above all original. In his way of thinking, of presenting, in the works he creates and in the classes he teaches.

In 2002, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Metaphysical Club. In 2015, he received the National Humanities Medal from the then President of the United States, Barack Obama, for “prose and essays that invite us to think in new ways about the forces that shape our society.”

In The Free World – Art and Thought in the Cold War (Elsinore 2023), Louis Menand brings us an investigation and analysis of the causes of the United States’ assertion in the cultural landscape of the West during part of the cold war – from the end of World War II to the end of the Vietnam War – but written as a novel, with hundreds of characters.

From literature, music, visual and performing arts, science to cinema, from James Baldwin, John Cage, Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley, Susan Sontag and Hannah Arendt to Hollywood, no character or theme, fact or curiosity escapes Menand’s lucid and engaging narrative, offering the reader the complete mosaic of Western thought and art in the twentieth century.

This work was translated with the support of the FLAD Translation Program.

Meet the Author is an initiative of FLAD, in partnership with PÚBLICO newspaper. The goal is to provide Portuguese readers with close contact with some of the most respected writers in the USA.

The sessions take place monthly and are open to the general public, free of charge. The guest authors are interviewed by journalist Isabel Lucas.

The conversation with Louis Menand will take place on November 16, at 6:30 p.m., in the FLAD Auditorium, at Rua do Sacramento à Lapa, 21, in Lisbon.

The session is open to the public and admission is free. If you would like to attend, please send an email to cultura@flad.pt.