Adina Hoffman on Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris

Our winter season continues with Adina Hoffman (recipient of a 2013 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction) chatting with Michael Kelleher about Georges Perec’s magical and mercurial and maddening An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, translated by Marc Lowenthal.

Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (with Peter Cole), Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, and Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures. Hoffman’s essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the TLS, Raritan, Bookforum, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. She is formerly a film critic for the American Prospect and the Jerusalem Post and was one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small press devoted to the publication of the literature of the Levant. She has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University, Middlebury College, and NYU, as well as the Franke Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. She lives in Jerusalem and New Haven.