In her wide-ranging collection of essays, Lessard, a longtime New Yorker writer, founding editor of The Washington Monthly, and a self-described “collector of places,” combines sharply observed description, history, and philosophical reflection to explore the meaning of landscapes. As she guides us through places that have meant something to her personally—the Hudson River Valley, a neighborhood in Brooklyn—as well as those with larger resonance, such as preserved Civil War battlefields, whitewashed Southern plantations, the King of Prussia shopping mall, and the Columbia University campus, Lessard shows not only how different places shape the lives that inhabit them, but presents American landscape itself as a metaphor for recent shifts in national consciousness.
Lessard will be in conversation with Howard Norman, winner of the Lannan Award for literature and author of many novels, most recently the upcoming The Ghost Clause.
