Gwendoline Riley presents "First Love" & "My Phantoms," with Merve Emre

Gwendoline Riley joins us to present her novels "First Love" & "My Phantoms" — published simultaneously in the US by New York Review Books — in conversation with Merve Emre. This virtual event, brought to you as part of our ongoing series with our friends at NYRB, took place on Zoom. To purchase the books (and support Community Bookstore): https://communitybookstore.net/browse...

About our guests:

Gwendoline Riley is an English writer. Born in London, she published her first novel, "Cold Water," in 2002. Her novel "First Love" was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, and won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. She has also been awarded a Betty Trask Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, and has been shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. In 2018, the Times Literary Supplement named her one of the twenty best British and Irish novelists working today.

Merve Emre is associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of "Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America," "The Ferrante Letters," and "The Personality Brokers." She is finishing a book titled "Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities" and writing a book called "Love and Other Useless Pursuits." She is a contributing writer at the New Yorker. Her essays and criticism have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and the London Review of Books. From 2022-23, she will be a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University.