Peter Mendelsund — Exhibitionist: 1 Journal, 1 Depression, 100 Paintings & Weepers - with Adrienne LaFrance

This event is in partnership with The Atlantic. Exhibitionist: In the early days of the pandemic, Peter Mendelsund and his family traveled up to a secluded New Hampshire farmhouse to weather the chaos. There began his journey through a crippling and seemingly intractable depression--which differed in degree but not in kind from episodes that have recurred periodically throughout his life--that brought him to the brink of suicide.Relief came from an unlikely source: painting, something Peter had never contemplated doing before. And yet it became the thing that may very well have saved his life. Bleakly funny, profoundly moving, and--against all odds--truly inspiring, Exhibitionist is not just an account of a mind thinking through its own suffering in real-time, and of the author's reckoning with his father's tortured legacy; it's also the story of the birth of an artist, and a portrait of an artist at work.Weepers: Ed is a weeper. A professional weeper.He's a card-carrying member of an eccentric union hired to cry at funerals, wakes, services and burials. It's an odd job, but his services are sorely needed these days, as the town, the region, the country as a whole has become more or less numb. No one is able to summon a shred of human emotion whatsoever. Not anymore. (What'd be the point? The world's already gone to hell.)So there's always work for Ed and his colleagues. But all those cries can wear a man down, and the tears don't flow quite like they used to, even for a consummate pro like Ed.Then one morning, a stranger comes to town. A scrawny kid with no belongings, no parents, no name, no past. And at precisely the moment of his arrival, people begin to experience something new. Something strange. An onslaught of unbidden feelings, unfamiliar feelings, too many feelingsA surrealist story of mourning and messiahs, deserts and droughts, cowboys and junkies, miracles and mass hysteria, the lure of despair and the solace of friendship. Peter Mendelsund's Weepers is a novel for this age: our age of anesthesia and anger.PURCHASE BOOKS: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780374619077?ic_referral=f-1DinjUBrqFDZ5BHTl80--7xD6hlwiPhRa-I25JzyMwM5du5_xsVN6EcffwuTAHf3WLN6AmURntQOG9J_erzf3NS4VYsEAsSHYXfDdan1SoxEwWlffZEIwVOnKPScBcrWCK1Oshttps://politics-prose.com/book/9781646222896?ic_referral=oGvHOT144wzuIcW8fMb83cQBKaq0BhIWTWSdvNVEfZwwM-H0uB6se28OkYBIlfZdfE5Bn0TE9gVRpm4SgQQtqt4mQzdfzl4-2Js_DRLLUzT7LzDaTzaC-nFh3yneM4ff0ewM5DYPeter Mendelsund is a novelist, a graphic designer, and the creative director of The Atlantic. Mendelsund is the author of several books about literature and the visual imagination: What We See When We Read, Cover, and The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature. His debut novel, Same Same, was published in 2019.Mendelsund is in conversation with Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com. Before joining The Atlantic in 2014, LaFrance was an investigative reporter for several local and national news organizations, covering politics, technology, and media. She is a former reporter at WBUR, Hawaii Public Radio, Honolulu Weekly, Honolulu Civil Beat, and Nieman Journalism Lab. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and several other newspapers and magazines.