"There comes a longing," Wendell Berry once wrote, "to never travel again except on foot." Walking is one of life's earliest challenges, its most democratic pleasures, and yet it is not something we all perform with the same facility, or the same ease. What and who we are depends in some ways on how and where we can walk. This has been true in the United States for far too long, and we have seen the anguish that results when a simple walk ends in violence. In the inaugural issue of Freeman's, a new literary biannaual from the former editor of Granta, writers muse on a theme -- arrival -- at the root of this question: can we all move through space equally? From Haruki Murakami to Lydia Davis to Louise Erdrich and David Mitchell. And what happens when we arrive?
Come to Garden District Bookshop on Wednesday December 2nd for an evening's reading and discussion with John Freeman, the journal's editor, and Garnette Cadogan, one of its contributors, who has written a beautful and moving essay on his decade long struggle to re-learn how to walk in America -- after growing up in Kingston, Jamaica -- as a black man, first in New Orleans, and then later, New York City. The Saturday Paper called it '"a pulse-pounding discovery" and the Australian called it the issue's "stand-out piece."
About Garnette Cadogan: Garnette Cadogan writes on history, culture, and the arts, among other subjects. His work explores the dynamics of cultural change, particularly in urban settings. He is editor-at-large for Non-Stop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (forthcoming) and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of the Harlem Renaissance (forthcoming). His current research interests are the promise and perils of metropolitan life, the relationship between commerce and creativity, and the phenomenology of walking.
He has received fellowships for research from Yale University, the University of Chicago, and New York University, where he is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Public Knowledge. At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at University of Virginia, Cadogan will be writing a book on walking and working closely with the Thriving Cities Project.
About John Freeman: John Freeman was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include "How to Read a Novelist" and "Tales of Two Cities: the Best of Times and Worst of Times in Today's New York," an anthology about New York City during the age of enormous income gaps, which features an essay by Cadogan. Freeman is an executive editor at the Literary Hub and teaches at the New School and NYU. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.
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