CITY LIGHTS LIVE! Hari Kunzru in conversation with Eungie Joo

City Lights and Alfred A. Knopf celebrate the publication of
BLUE RUIN
By Hari Kunzru
published by Alfred A. Knopf
Purchase book here:
citylights.com/blue-ruin
From one of the sharpest voices in fiction today, a profound and enthralling novel about beauty and power, capital, art and those who devote their lives to creating it.
Once, Jay was an artist. After graduating from art school in London, he was tipped for greatness, a promising career taking shape before him. That was not to happen. Now, undocumented in the United States, having survived Covid, he lives out of his car and barely makes a living as an essential worker, delivering groceries in a wealthy area of upstate New York. One day, as Jay attempts to make a delivery at a house surrounded by acres of woods, he is confronted by his destructive past: Alice, a former lover from his art school days, and the friend she left him for. Recognizing Jay’s dire circumstances, Alice invites him to stay on their property-where an erratic gallery owner and his girlfriend are isolating as well-setting in motion a reckoning that has been decades in the making.
Gripping and brilliantly orchestrated, Blue Ruin moves back and forth through time, delivering an extraordinary portrait of an artist as he reunites with his past and confronts the world he once loved and left behind.
Hari Kunzru is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Eungie Joo is curator and head of Contemporary Art at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she is working with Kara Walker on her latest major installation, Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine), opening July 2024. In addition to exhibition making and collection building, Joo’s curatorial practice is deeply engaged with discursive and performative practices as well as the commissioning and production of new works. Joo has worked internationally as Artistic Director of the 5th Anyang Public Art Project; Curator of Sharjah Biennial 12; Curator of the New Museum Generational Triennial; and Commissioner of the Korean Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale, to name a few. She was the Director and Curator of Education and Public Programs at the New Museum from 2007-2012, and founding curator of the Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles. She has published widely, including recent essays on the work of Cinthia Marcelle, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Adrián Villar Rojas.
Originally broadcast on Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation.