André Aciman / Call Me By Your Name & Enigma Variations

Booksmith is thrilled to host André Aciman reading from his sensational novels Call Me By Your Name—now a major motion picture nominated for three Golden Globes—andEnigma Variations.

Please note: Due to popular demand, this event has been moved to Booksmith (1644 Haight St.). The event is free to attend, but seating is limited. 

André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents’ cliffside mansion on the Italian Riviera. Each is unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, when, during the restless summer weeks, unrelenting currents of obsession, fascination, and desire intensify their passion and test the charged ground between them. Recklessly, the two verge toward the one thing both fear they may never truly find again: total intimacy. It is an instant classic and one of the great love stories of our time.

A USA Today bestseller, Los Angeles Times bestseller, and New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Call Me by Your Name was named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly, The Seattle Times, and New York Magazine, and the film has been called “far and away the best movie of the year” by rogerebert.com; Esquire says it has “some of the most emotional moments in film history.”

—Enigma Variations—

Enigma Variations charts the life of a man named Paul, whose loves remain as consuming and as covetous throughout his adulthood as they were in his adolescence. Whether the setting is southern Italy, where as a boy he has a crush on his parents’ cabinetmaker, or a snowbound campus in New England, where his enduring passion for a girl he’ll meet again and again over the years is punctuated by anonymous encounters with men—whether he’s on a tennis court in Central Park or on a New York sidewalk in early spring. Paul’s attachments are ungraspable, transient, and forever underwritten by raw desire.

Ahead of every step Paul takes, his hopes, denials, fears, and regrets are always ready to lay their traps. Yet the dream of love lingers. We may not always know what we want. We may remain enigmas to ourselves and to other. But sooner or later, we discover who we’ve always known we were.

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“[Aciman is] up to something bolder this time . . . Aciman is all the way himself here. He writes with the ferocity of a writer who’s finally getting his vision down, and he has to say it, has to get it out. He’s made a magnificent, living thing.” —Paul Lisicky, New York Times Book Review 

“A breathless, sketched rendering of one man’s life in love, Aciman’s novel speaks earnestly not only of longing and lust, but also of more complicated emotions . . . [Aciman] portrays Paul convincingly as a sensuous and self-aware figure, forever treading the border between melodrama and tragedy.” —Publishers Weekly 

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André Aciman is the author of Call Me By Your Name, Out of Egypt, Eight White Nights, False Papers, Alibis, and Harvard Square, and the editor of The Proust Project (all published by FSG). He teaches comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and lives with his wife in Manhattan.

Please note:

>>> This event will be at Booksmith at 1644 Haight. RSVP appreciated but not required.

>>> This is a free event, but seating is limited.