JOEL AGEE PRESENTS HIS NOVEL, "THE STONE WORLD,"  Feb. 22, 2022, 7:30PM, EST 
in conversation with Siri Hustvedt. $0.00

This virtual event will take place on ZOOM. There is no charge. However, please click here to register for this exciting event.

The adult world surrounding him is in a state of ferment. Federico, the boyfriend of the family’s live-in-maid, Zita, helps lead a railroad strike for a small increase in wages that tragically fails. World War II is over, and Pira’s stepfather, an exiled communist German writer, and his émigré friends yearn to go home. But their hopes battle fears of what may await them when they return. Pira’s mother, a classical musician, weighs the anguishing choice of selling her violin to finance the move back to Europe.

Pira, meanwhile, plays marbles with poor street children. Though aware of social injustice and the troubling effects of political division, he experiences life without prejudice or reserve. Vulnerable to the harshness and beauty of existence, and sensitive to dimensions of mind that are hidden to his parents, he finds support in the magic of prayer, which Zita has taught him.

Readers are invited, for full participation in the book, to place themselves at eye-level with a six-year-old child. Those who do so may enjoy the wonder of remembering their own childhood.
 

Praise for The Stone World

“Joel Agee's astonishing new novel is one of the purest, most penetrating explorations of childhood I have ever read. Driven by a prose almost transparent in its clarity, the book takes us so deep into the inner life of its six-year-old protagonist that the customary boundaries between writer and reader, reader and text and truth dissolve. We are inside the inside and therefore outside ourselves--at one with the book. The Stone World is more than a great literary achievement, it is a remarkable human achievement as well.” —Paul Auster, author of Burning Boy,

“In The Stone World, a child's particular experiences are rendered with such radiant lucidity, exquisite nuance, and honest feeling they become universal. It is childhood itself that Joel Agee returns to his reader. We all were short people once, puzzling out the strange ways and often opaque language of the grownups, as well as our own fears, loves, pains, and wonders, but the specificity of these realities recedes with time. In this brilliant novel, that lost world is resurrected with a force and clarity that is nothing less than astounding.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of Mothers, Fathers, and Others, and Memories of the Future

Joel Agee is a writer and translator. He has won numerous literary awards, among them the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, and the ALTA National Translation Award, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, and other magazines, and he is the author of two highly praised memoirs: Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany and In the House of My Fear. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Joel Agee is the son of acclaimed writer James Agee. 

Siri Hustvedt, a novelist and scholar, has a PhD in English literature and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of a book of poems, seven novels, four collections of essays, and two works of nonfiction.

CLICK THE PHOTO BELOW FOR INFORMATION ON ORDERING