Join Garth Risk Hallberg, Maaza Mengiste, Tom Roberge, Caroline Weber, & H.C. Wilentz as they engage in a joyful and witty debate about the merits of the five titles nominated for the Albertine Prize over a glass of French wine! Literary Hub Editor in Chief Jonny Diamond will moderate this lively panel!

Come cheer for your favorite book, and don’t forget to cast your vote for the Albertine Prize here.

The book champions participating in the battle will include the following:

Garth Risk Hallberg, defending Compass by Mathias Énard
Maaza Mengiste, defending The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis
Tom Roberge, defending Not One Day by Anne Garréta
Caroline Weber, defending Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou
H. C. Wilentz, defending Incest by Christine Angot

The Albertine Prize is a reader’s choice award for French literature in English. Discover all of the shortlisted titles and vote here for your favorite before May 1st. 

Follow the event on Facebook.

Not in New York? Join us via Livestream.

Jonny Diamond is the Editor in Chief of Literary Hub, and is the founding editor of The L Magazine and Brooklyn Magazine.

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of the internationally acclaimed and bestselling novel City on Fire. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and, most frequently, The Millions; a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was published in 2007. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe and other publications. Her fiction and nonfiction can be found in The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC Radio, and Lettre International, among other places.

Tom Roberge has worked at McNally Jackson Booksellers, the literary magazine ‘A Public Space’, and the book publishers Penguin Books and New Directions. he is the Albertine’s former Deputy Director, and the co-owner and co-founder of the bookstore RiffRaff in Providence. He is co-host – along with Open Letter’s Chad Post – of the Three Percent Podcast.

Before coming to Barnard/Columbia, Caroline Weber  taught for seven years at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in eighteenth-century French literature and culture, with particular emphasis on the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, Weber is the author of Terror and its Discontents: Suspect Words and the French Revolution (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and of Fragments of Revolution (Yale University Press, 2001), an edited volume of essays on revolutionary culture. More recently, she published Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution (Henry Holt, 2006/Picador, 2007). A study of the political impact of Marie-Antoinette’s controversial clothing choices, Queen of Fashion made the LA Times best-seller list and was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times and a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Book World and Borders Books and Music. Her new book, Proust’s Duchess, will be published next May, with Knopf.

H. C. Wilentz  is on the editorial staff of the New Yorker.