James Agee to Toast Scott Korb’s New Book
…
Friday, March 19th, 2010, 7-9 pm
KGB Bar
85 East 4th Street, New York, NY
What do first-century Palestinians have in common with Depression-era tenant farmers? Find out on March 19th at KGB Bar in New York City, as the writer James Agee (1909-1955) is expected to return from the dead to celebrate the release of Scott Korb’s Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine. The event, sponsored by Killing the Buddha, will feature readings by Korb—in the flesh—and Agee—as summoned by KtB’s resident medium Ashley Makar. Before and after, join the authors for drinks and conversation.
Publishers Weekly says of Life in Year One, “Korb’s vivid, breezy prose makes accessible a mountain of scholarship that illuminates the past.” Jeff Sharlet, the New York Times bestselling author of The Family and founding editor of KtB, has called it “Expertly researched, beautifully distilled, and filled with wit.”
Scott Korb is co-author, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us and associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, winner of the American Historical Association’s 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize. He currently teaches religion and food writing at the New School and New York University. Read his tumblr at lifeinyearone.tumblr.com.
Killing the Buddha associate editor Ashley Makar is a writer from Alabama who is working toward a Masters of Divinity in religion and the arts at Yale Divinity School. She has conjured Agee before—from her KtB essay on what his punctuation might have to do with heaven, to her collaborative project on the musical afterlife of his prose-poem “Knoxville: Summer, 1915.” While writing about Sudanese refugees in Israel, Ashley likes to keep on hand a copy of Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the account of his journey with Walker Evans among Southern farmers.
