Join us at the beautiful Carnegie Visual Art Center for a special presentation given by James Nolan for his book, “Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar”. The book is a visceral account of the coronavirus years that blends first-person, present-tense commentary about the pandemic with the perspective of a memoir, including other epidemics James Nolan survived, first polio as a boy, then AIDS in San Francisco. The narrative is grounded in the social and political parallels drawn from writers who have explored past plagues, such as Boccaccio, Poe, Defoe, Pepys, Camus, Mann, Burroughs, and Kushner. These pages are largely focused on the author’s native New Orleans.
More information about “Between Dying and Not Dying, I Chose the Guitar” is available in a NPR radio interview with Susan Larson on “The Reading Life,” broadcast on WWNO on May 24 and 27, and available at any time on the “Reading Life” website: wwno.org/podcast/the-reading-life.
