with Josh Cook and Peter Coviello

Saturday, October 14, 2023
Fine Arts Stage, 10:00-10:45am
*This event is ASL interpreted!

Kick off your Festival day as Josh Cook, author of The Art of Libromancy: On Selling Books and Reading Books in the Twenty-First Century, and Peter Coviello, author of Is There God after Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things, present their new essay collections at TCBF! Renowned bookseller Cook turns a generous yet critical eye to the publishing landscape, using the simple act of putting a book in a reader’s hands as a lens through which to examine our changing literary culture, while critic Coviello asks what it means to love things in calamitous times, with essays on some of our favorite shows, songs, and books of recent decades. For those interested in cultural criticism, publishing and bookselling, pop culture, and Prince, this panel will be worth a morning arrival at TCBF!  

About the Authors

Josh Cook is a bookseller and co-owner at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has worked since 2004. He is also author of the critically acclaimed postmodern detective novel An Exaggerated Murder, and his fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in numerous leading literary publications. He grew up in Lewiston, Maine and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Peter Coviello is the author of five previous books, including Tomorrow’s Parties, a finalist for a 2013 Lambda Award in LGBT Studies; Long Players, a memoir selected as one of Artforum’s Ten Best Books of 2018; and Make Yourselves Gods. His essays have appeared in Frieze, Chicago Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Raritan, Elle, and Believer, among other publications. He is professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he specializes in American literature and queer theory.