Moving The Palace

Join Lebanese author Charif Majdalani as he discusses Moving The Palace, his latest novel published in the US, with author and literary critic Nathaniel Popkin. Moving The Palace is a captivating modern-day Odyssey in the tradition of Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux. It won the 2008 François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française as well as the Prix Tropiques.

In English. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

Charif Majdalani, born in Lebanon in 1960, is often likened to a Lebanese Proust. Majdalani lived in France from 1980 to 1993 and now teaches French literature at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut. The original French version of his novel Moving the Palacewon the 2008 François Mauriac Prize from the Académie Française as well as the Prix Tropiques.

Nathaniel Popkin is a writer, editor, historian, journalist, and the author of five books, including the novel Everything is Borrowed, forthcoming in May 2018 (New Door Books). Popkin’s first novel, Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), is a mediation on originality and influence in art. The novel was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Indie Book of the Year Award.
Popkin has been a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellow and a writer-in-residence at Philadelphia University and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.He’s the co-editor of Who Will Speak for America?, a literary anthology in response to the American political crisis, also forthcoming, in June 2018 (Temple University Press). He’s the fiction review editor of Cleaver Magazine, as well as a prolific book critic—and National Book Critics Circle member—focusing on literary fiction and works in translation. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Public Books, The Rumpus, Tablet Magazine, LitHub, The Millions, and the Kenyon Review, among other publications.