Don’t miss an unforgettable evening celebrating author, cultural critic, and controversial thinker Thomas Chatterton Williams as he discusses his latest work, Summer of Our Discontent. This evening is generously hosted by FLOK Lit and Karen Mehiel. Books will be available for all attendees.
“Mass insanity broke out among America’s elites in the summer of 2020, with devastating consequences for America’s knowledge-creating institutions. Thomas Chatterton Williams is one of the few intellectuals who stood firm and made the case with great courage for liberal values and the free exchange of ideas. In Summer of our Discontent he returns with a gift: a way of understanding what happened to us that preserves the humanity of all parties and points the way forward toward renewal.” —Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation
“Thomas Chatterton Williams uses a fiercely probing intelligence, instinctively dissatisfied with absolutist explanations, to explore without ideological blindfolds what happened in one momentous summer. Camus would have liked this book.” —Adam Gopnik, bestselling author of The Real Work
“Thomas Chatterton Williams manages to make moral and cultural sense of a profoundly perplexing time. By seeing clearly, reflecting honestly, writing with real power and style, and beginning from the premise that no faction is entirely right or entirely wrong, he offers genuine illumination. This is an essential book.” —Yuval Levin, author of American Covenant
In this provocative book, Thomas Chatterton Williams, one of the most revered and reviled social commentators of our time, paints a clear and detailed picture of the ideas and events that have paved the way for the dramatic paradigm shift in social justice that has taken place over the past few years. Taking aim at the ideology of critical race theory, the rise of an oppressive social media, the fall from Obama to Trump, and the twinned crises of COVID-19 and the murder of George Floyd, Williams documents the extent to which this transition has altered media, artistic creativity, education, employment, policing, and, most profoundly, the ambient language and culture we use to make sense of our lives.
Williams also decries how liberalism—the very foundation of an open and vibrant society—is in existential crisis, under assault from both the right and the left, especially in our predominantly networked, Internet-driven monoculture.
Sure to be highly controversial, Summer of Our Discontent is a compelling look at our place in a radically changing world.
About Thomas Chatterton Williams:
Thomas Chatterton Williams is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is also a visiting professor of humanities at Bard College, a 2022 Guggenheim fellow, and a nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of Self-Portrait in Black and White and Losing My Cool. Williams’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Le Monde, and many other places, and has been collected in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. His next book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse, will be published by Knopf.
Please contact Renee Lamarque at [email protected] if you’re interested in attending this special evening. Donations to attend this evening are $350. Following your RSVP, you will be sent the address for the dinner. The donation is considered 100% tax-deductible and supports PEN America’s mission to defend writers and free expression at a time of unprecedented need. Your generosity is deeply appreciated.
About PEN America Authors’ Evenings
The PEN America Authors’ Evenings are nights of literary dinners in private homes and intimate settings. Please visit the Authors’ Evenings webpage for our full calendar of dinners.
Proceeds from the PEN America Authors’ Evenings support PEN America’s programming to secure the liberty of persecuted and imprisoned writers around the world, to defend freedom of expression, and to promote literature and international cultural exchange.