Past
Lincoln Center
Please note that this event has been canceled as part of the Metropolitan Opera's closure, a measure taken in consideration for public health.
The Paris Review joins the Metropolitan Opera on Friday, March 20, to celebrate the marriage of literature and music in Werther, the celebrated opera by Jules Massenet based on the classic work of German Romanticism by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Prior to the performance, writer Alexander Chee will host a special event inspired by the heartache and passion of impossible love. Chee, Michael Robbins, and Jessi Jezewska Stevens will share selections of their work and archival pieces from The Paris Review. Members of the Met Orchestra will add to the drama with a brief performance of another of Massenet’s aching compositions.
The program will take place on Friday, March 20, at the Metropolitan Opera, located at 30 Lincoln Center Plaza and will begin at 6 PM. The program will be followed by the Fridays Under 40 reception at 7 PM and opera at 8 PM.
More information is available on the Met Opera’s Friday’s Under 40 page.
Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night and
the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, published by Mariner Books. He is a contributing editor to The New Republic, an editor at large for VQR, and a critic at large at the Los Angeles Times. His essays and stories have appeared in T Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, The Yale Review, and The Sewanee Review and have been anthologized in the Best American Essays and the collection What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About. He is an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College.
Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator and the forthcoming Walkman, both published by Penguin, and the essay collection Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, published by Simon & Schuster. He is an assistant professor of English at Montclair State University.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novel The Exhibition of Persephone Q, which was recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, the Harper’s website, 4Columns, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other places. She has received nominations for the Henfield Prize and the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize, as well as support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, and Art Omi. She lives in New York City, where she teaches fiction, most recently at Columbia University and Catapult.