Sybille Bedford at The Paris Review:
A Centennial Tribute
Thursday March 24, 2011
The Paris Review
62 White Street, 4th floor
New York, New York 10013
Reception: 6:30 p.m.
Reading: 7:00 p.m.
Curated by Lisa Cohen
Sybille Bedford (1911-2006) was one of the great twentieth-century stylists of the English language. She was also a connoisseur of food and wine who had a genius for living; she called herself “a sybarite with a political conscience.” Much of her work moves freely between memoir and fiction, exploring the pleasures and traumas of her upbringing in the South of France between the wars. She lived New York City during World War II, then spent over a year in Mexico; the result was the blend of memoir, invention, travelogue, and history that is her first book, A Visit to Don Otavio. In the 1960s, she covered the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in London, of Jack Ruby in Dallas, and of the Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt, producing crystallized essays about character, justice, and the rituals of law. Her last book, Quicksands, was published in 2005. She has been dubbed a modernist and a traditionalist; her cool, staccato dialogue has been compared to Quentin Tarantino’s. Please join Sylvia Brownrigg, Lisa Cohen, Caleb Crain, Courtney Hodell, Honor Moore, Matthew Sharpe, and Peter Terzian for a reading and celebration of her work.
PLEASE NOTE: This event is open to the public, but The Paris Review has limited space. If you would like to attend, please write to rsvp at theparisreview.org with the subject line “Sybille’s Centennial.”