Friday, February 3
7:00pm
THE TENDER HOUR OF TWILIGHT, by Richard Seaver
Join us for an evening of tribute to legendary editor, translator and publisher, Richard Seaver.
Richard Seaver was at the center of literary life in 1950s Paris, establishing the magazine Merlin, and publishing Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. He championed Samuel Beckett in an essay that got the …
Join us for an evening of tribute to legendary editor, translator and publisher, Richard Seaver.
Richard Seaver was at the center of literary life in 1950s Paris, establishing the magazine Merlin, and publishing Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet. He championed Samuel Beckett in an essay that got the attention of Barney Rosset, the editor of Grove Press, which helped bring Beckett to American audiences. It also got Seaver a job at Grove. The book follows Seaver from Paris to New York when, as a top editor at Grove Press in the 1960s, he went on to publish books with content that challenged censorship laws— including William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn Son; and the French erotic novel The Story of O, written under a pseudonym. Seaver died in 2009 and The Tender Hour of Twilight is his memoir, condensed by his wife from 900 pages of notes he wrote over the course of his life.
“It was Seaver who manned the barricades so that the rest of us could read. He was also, as anyone who reads The Tender Hour of Twilight will discover, quite a formidable writer himself.”—Jane Kramer
“This book reminds us how much Dick Seaver is missed, and lucky we—publishers, writers, readers, literature itself—were to have had him in our lives. The Tender Hour of Twilight is as fascinating, as insightful, and as generous as the man himself.”—Daniel Okrent
