The Pulitzer Prize Finalist discusses his novel about money, family, and perception.
Benjamin and Helen Rask are famous in 1920s New York; he is a Wall Street tycoon and she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. They have risen to the top of a world of extreme wealth just as a decade of excess collapses. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. In Trust, Hernan Diaz puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another-and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on finding the truth. The result is a novel filled with revelations that unfold over the course of a century.
Hernan Diaz researched and wrote Trust during his 2020-2021 Fellowship at the Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Hernan Diaz is the author of two novels translated into more than twenty languages, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has published stories and essays in the Paris Review, Granta, Playboy, the Yale Review, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. His first novel, In the Distance, won the Saroyan International Prize, the Cabell Award, the Prix Page America, and the New American Voices Award, among other distinctions. It was also a Publishers Weekly Top 10 Book of the Year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 Best Novels of the Decade. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Ingmar Bergman Estate. Trust is his second novel.
Jean Strouse is the author of Morgan: American Financier and Alice James: A Biography, which won the Bancroft Prize in American History. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Architectural Digest, Vogue, and Slate. She has held fellowships from the MacArthur and Guggenheim Foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A past president of the Society of American Historians, she served as director of the Cullman Center from 2003 to 2017. Currently she is writing a book about twelve portraits by John Singer Sargent of the family of Asher Wertheimer, a prominent London art dealer.
30 май 2022
