Our virtual classics book club is reading Machiavelli this April. Denounced as the work of Satan after their publication five centuries ago, Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses on Livy still feel “astonishingly modern.”
Ilan Stavans, our publisher and Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, will lead the discussion, hosted by the New York Public Library and the Jones Library in Amherst.
In the aftermath of Trump, eighteen years since the US invaded Iraq, our Restless Classics edition takes a much-needed long view on questions of power and statecraft. How do rulers use and justify violence? How do they deceive? How should they relate to the governed—to us? New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson’s introduction on bad men and their methods is a helpful starting point.
When: Wednesday, April 28 at 8 pm ET
Where: via Zoom. Please register through the New York Public Library (you don’t need to be a patron to register).
About the Host
Ilan Stavans is the Publisher of Restless Books and the Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities, Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include On Borrowed Words, Spanglish, Dictionary Days, The Disappearance, and A Critic’s Journey. He has edited The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature, the three-volume set Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, among dozens of other volumes. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Chile’s Presidential Medal, the International Latino Book Award, and the Jewish Book Award. Stavans’s work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to the stage and screen. A cofounder of the Great Books Summer Program at Amherst, Stanford, Chicago, Oxford, and Dublin, he is the host of the NPR podcast "In Contrast."