Harvard Book Store Virtual Event: Brad Fox

Virtual Event: Brad Fox
presenting To Remain Nameless: A Novel
in conversation with CLAIRE MESSUD

Harvard Book Store’s virtual event series welcomes author, journalist, and translator BRAD FOX for a discussion of his debut novel, To Remain Nameless. He will be joined in conversation by acclaimed local writer CLAIRE MESSUD, author of the celebrated novels The Emperor’s Children and The Burning Girl.

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About To Remain Nameless

Tess keeps vigil at the bedside of her friend Laura through a long night of labor as Laura’s first child arrives. The two have known each other for what seems like forever. Their humanitarian aid work has taken them from the Balkans, to Egypt, to Istanbul amid the ongoing refugee crisis—an era that includes the US’s war in Iraq, the Arab Spring, and many forms of global consequence and aftermath. Brad Fox’s first novel is a luminous inquiry into the incarnations and limits of hope. This writer helps us endure our questions about what forms care may take, what we may offer to anyone, near and far.

Praise for To Remain Nameless

“Brad Fox’s virtuoso novelistic voice, alternately terse and florid, in the mode of José Saramago, Roberto Bolaño, or Alberto Moravia, is sonorous, lapidary, and melancholy—a seamless dreamy fabulist omniscience, bearing world-weary witness to perilous events, both inner and outer . . . The room compresses; the world expands. Djuna Barnes and Virginia Woolf pioneered this trick of simultaneous engorgement and diminution, of funhouse-mirror space-time reversal; and now Brad Fox, wonder-worker, takes up the dizzying mantle.” —Wayne Koestenbaum

“To Remain Nameless is a gorgeous meditation on a shifting self in a shifting world, a querying-onward in which there’s both melancholy and delight.” —Shelley Jackson

“From Kansas City to Cairo to New York to the Balkans, Brad Fox goes to the heart of the contemporary experience. Stories of humanitarian crimes, errant friendships and euphoric protests come together in a tough, clean, elegant prose that moves gracefully from one continent to the next. This book is sprinkled throughout with a gravelly humour and a nod to Beckett’s sense of Can’t go on, must go on.” —Colum McCann