Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 15 May
6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
It’s nice to be surprised as a reader. You open the pages thinking you know how the story goes, but instead you’re ambushed by an unexpected turn, or a narrator who usually stars in a different story altogether. In back-to-back events, we bring you two contemporary American writers who break taboos and rewrite conventions as naturally as they brush their teeth.
Composer Joshua Cody says he’s not really a writer – but his raw, cerebral cancer memoir, [sic], suggests otherwise. The New York Times called it ‘the memoir of the year’ and praised the way its ‘sentences swing into you like small, gleaming axes’. This is experience alchemised into literature, folding in sex, drugs, rock n roll… and cancer.
Jeffrey Eugenides is one of the most celebrated names in contemporary American literature. From the darkly hip, deceptively slender The Virgin Suicides to the sprawling, eccentric gender adventure Middlesex, he’s known for tweaking convention. In his acclaimed latest novel, The Marriage Plot, he subverts the oldest convention in the book, delivering an end-of-the-millennium coming-of-age spiked with sly wit and Regency romance.
Jeffrey Eugenides will be in conversation with Michael Williams. Joshua Cody will be appearing with Chris Flynn.
Jeffrey Eugenides is presented in partnership with Melbourne Writers Festival.
Featuring
Chris Flynn
Chris Flynn is the author of The Glass Kingdom and A Tiger in Eden, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Age, the Australian, Griffith Review, Meanjin, Australian Book Review, the Saturday Paper, Smith Journal, the Big Issue, Monster Children and many other publications. He has conducted interviews for the Paris Review and is a regular presenter at literary festivals across Australia. Chris lives on Phillip Island, next to a penguin sanctuary.
Joshua Cody
Joshua Cody’s first book is [sic], a memoir about cancer, creativity and twentysomething life in New York City.
Joshua Cody received his bachelor’s degree in music composition from Northwestern University, and his master’s and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. Joshua is a composer living in New York City.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993) was translated into 15 languages and made into a major motion picture. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex.
Jeffrey is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Foundation for the Arts, and the receiver of a Whiting Writers' Award. His most recent work, The Marriage Plot, is a novel about the glories and vicissitudes of young love. Born in Detroit, he now lives in New York.