This event will be held in English.
Co-sponsored by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and the American Library in Paris as part of our Entre Nous series. This event is also co-sponsored by La Volte.
The Reid Hall Caféothèque will be open before the event with wine and snacks for sale.
Register here.
Nina MacLaughlin discusses her novel Wake, Siren, now available in French translation from La Volte publishing house. The author will read passages in the original English, then answer questions from the audience. The English edition and French translation will be available for purchase after the event.
Wake, Siren
"Vital, vivid, and angry."
― Kirkus, starred review
"More than thirty women from Ovid’s Metamorphoses . . . reclaim their stories in this stirring collection of vignettes . . . Above all, they both suffer and find strength at the hands of lascivious men and wrathful gods."
― The New Yorker
Drawing on the rhythms of epic poetry and alt rock, of everyday speech and folk song, of fireside whisperings and therapy sessions, Nina MacLaughlin, the acclaimed author of Hammer Head, recovers what is lost when the stories of women are told and translated by men. She breathes new life into these fraught and well-loved myths.
Seductresses and she-monsters, nymphs and demi-goddesses, populate the famous myths of Ovid's Metamorphoses. But what happens when the story of the chase comes in the voice of the woman fleeing her rape? When the beloved coolly returns the seducer's gaze? When tales of monstrous transfiguration are sung by those transformed? In voices both mythic and modern, Wake, Siren revisits each account of love, loss, rape, revenge, and change. It lays bare the violence that undergirds and lurks in the heart of Ovid's narratives, stories that helped build and perpetuate the distorted portrayal of women across centuries of art and literature.
Nina MacLaughlin
Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG/FSG Originals), a re-telling of Ovid's Metamorphoses told from the perspective of the female figures transformed, as well as Summer Solstice: An Essay (Black Sparrow). Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton). Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and is now a books columnist for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She carves spoons and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The place
For nearly sixty years, Columbia University students and faculty have come to study, teach, or pursue their research at Reid Hall, an exceptional space in the world of international education and cultural exchange. Our public events draw on the rich resources of the Columbia campus and our local partners, creating a "third space" of intellectual exploration and research that resists easy categorization. Our workshops, lectures, and performances bring together a diverse audience to address pressing issues through creative, rigorous, and open dialogue.
Today, Reid Hall is home to several Columbia University initiatives: Columbia Global Centers | Paris, Columbia Undergraduate Programs, M.A. in History and Literature, Columbia’s architecture program, and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. This unique combination of resources is enhanced by our global network whose mission is to expand the University's engagement the world over through educational programs, research collaborations, regional partnerships, and public events.
The views and opinions expressed by speakers and guests do not necessarily reflect the official policies or positions of Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, the American Library in Paris, or their affiliates.
