#booktalk I’m always so grateful when out of town events still offer virtual options.

“Award-winning author Helen Garner makes a rare US appearance upon the reissue of two of her masterworks — The Children’s Bach and The House of Grief — in conversation with The New Yorker’s Merve Emre. “Helen Garner has written two of the greatest novels of the twentieth-century, Monkey Grip and The Children’s Bach,” Emre writes. “In both her fiction and non-fiction, her writing is startling and startlingly precise, intelligent, and unafraid to look directly at the darkness that hides in the world and in all of us.” Long considered one of the greatest novelists Australia has ever produced — and an important influence on a generation of American writers like Lauren Groff, Ben Lerner, Rumaan Alam, and others — the publication of her early novels in the US is a major event. Hear her and Emre in a candid discussion on her magnificent writing — the arc of a commanding, profoundly moving, and important body of work coming into full focus for the first time.