Fri 22 July / The Drawing Center, New York / 6-8 p.m. / Free / Register
P&T Knitwear, The White Review, and Duke University Press present author Shola von Reinhold as she reads from and discusses her debut novel, LOTE. Von Reinhold will be joined in conversation by journalist Harron Walker. Refreshments will be served.
- This is a free off-site event at The Drawing Center in Soho, with limited seating
- We request all guests wear masks.
- The talk will be followed by a book signing. Books signed at P&T Knitwear events must be purchased from P&T Knitwear. If you would like a signed copy and cannot attend the event, we’re happy to take your pre-order. We ship most places!
Solitary Mathilda has long harbored a conflicted enchantment bordering on rapture with the “Bright Young Things,” the Bloomsbury Group, and their contemporaries of the ’20s and ’30s, and throughout her life her attempts at reinvention have mirrored their extravagance and artfulness. After discovering a photograph of the forgotten Black modernist poet Hermia Druitt, who ran in the same circles as the Bright Young Things, Mathilda becomes transfixed and resolves to learn as much as she can about the mysterious figure. Her search brings her to a peculiar artists’ residency in Dun, a small European town in which Hermia was known to have lived during the ’30s. The artists’ residency throws her deeper into a lattice of secrets and secret societies that takes hold of her aesthetic imagination. From champagne theft and Black Modernisms to art sabotage, alchemy, and a lotus-eating proto-luxury communist cult, Mathilda’s “Escapes” through modes of aesthetic expression lead her to question the convoluted ways truth is made and obscured.
Shola von Reinhold is a writer born and based in Glasgow.
Harron Walker is a freelance journalist based out of New York. Her work has appeared on Vice, BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, Vulture, Into, Mask, and elsewhere.