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Penultimates: The Now and the Not-Yet (El Leon Literary Arts/Manoa Books, 2024) is Thomas Farber's (English) wry and mordant meditation on aging. As he approaches eighty, his interconnected short essays and prose poems assess his own mortality — and ours. Drawing on insights and struggles of various artists and thinkers, he both memorializes lost friends and takes the measure of our current moment.

Farber's many works of fiction and nonfiction include Acting My Age, Here and Gone, The End of My Wits, Brief Nudity, and The Beholder. He has received numerous awards including Guggenheim, Fulbright, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for fiction and creative nonfiction, and the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize. 

"Somewhere in that infinite space between poetry and prose sits this latest (always asking itself if it's the last) work by the iconoclastic, inestimable Thomas Farber. Weaving together memory and memorials, a clear-eyed view of what it means to face an end (the end?), and Farber's wide-ranging and discursive understanding of friendship, ambition, work, and love in all their many complexities, Penultimates is a lively, empathetic, funny, and above all searingly compassionate view of the world as Farber has lived and loved it." 

— Eva Hagberg, author of When Eero Met His Match and How To Be Loved

Farber is joined by John Shoptaw (English). After a brief discussion, they respond to questions from the audience.