Benjamin Taylor Book Launch and Reading

Benjamin Taylor received a 2021 Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir Here We Are was published by Penguin Books in May 2020. His previous memoir, The Hue and Cry at Our House, received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice; his Proust: The Search was named a Best Book of 2016 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review and Robert McCrum in The Observer (London); and his Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay was named a Best Book of 2012 by Judith Thurman in The New Yorker. He is also the author of two novels, Tales Out of School, winner of the 1996 Harold Ribalow Prize, and The Book of Getting Even, winner of a Barnes & Noble Discover Award. He edited Saul Bellow: Letters, named a Best Book of 2010 by Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times and Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, and Bellow’s There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction, also a New York Times Editors’ Choice. His edition of the collected stories of Susan Sontag, Debriefing, was published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2017. French and Italian translations of Here We Are were published in 2021. He is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and serves as president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. Chasing Bright Medusas, his biography of Willa Cather, is due from Viking Press in 2023.

Julie Olin-Ammentorp received her A.B. in English from Middlebury College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan, along with a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. She is the author of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture and Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War. She has also authored chapters in The New Edith Wharton Studies, Edith Wharton in Context, and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country: A Reassessment, as well as more than twenty articles on Wharton, Cather, and Henry James. She recently edited a new edition of Wharton's World War I novel, A Son at the Front, that was published in June, and she has contributed an essay to the forthcoming issue of the Willa Cather Review devoted to the 100th publication anniversary of Cather's 1923 novel A Lost Lady. She is a past member of the Board of Governors of the Willa Cather Foundation and a past president of the Edith Wharton Society.