French novelist Adrien Bosc and American legendary author Gay Talese will discuss Constellation, Bosc’s best-selling debut novel (Other Press), based on the true story of the 1949 disappearance of Air France’s Lockheed Constellation and its famous passengers.
On October 27, 1949, Air France’s new plane, the Constellation, launched by the extravagant Howard Hughes, welcomed thirty-eight passengers aboard. On October 28, no longer responding to air traffic controllers, the plane disappeared while trying to land on the island of Santa Maria, in the Azores. No one survived.

The question Adrien Bosc’s novel asks is not so much how, but why? What were the series of tiny incidents that, in sequence, propelled the plane toward Redondo Mountain? And who were the passengers? As we recognize Marcel Cerdan, the famous boxer and lover of Edith Piaf, and we remember the musical prodigy Ginette Neveu, whose tattered violin would be found years later, the author ties together their destinies: “Hear the dead, write their small legend, and offer to these thirty-eight men and women, like so many constellations, a life and a story.”

In English. Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

Adrien Bosc was born in 1986 in Avignon. Constellation, the winner of the prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l’academie francaise and a best seller in France, is his first novel. 

Gay Talese was born in Ocean City, New Jersey, on February 7th, 1932, to Italian immigrant parents. He attended the University of Alabama, and after graduation was hired as a copyboy at the New York Times. After a brief stint in the Army, Talese returned to the New York Times in 1956 and worked there as a reporter until 1965. Since then he has written for numerous publications, including Esquire, The New Yorker, Newsweek, and Harper’s Magazine.
Gay Talese has written eleven books. His earlier bestsellers deal with the history and influence of The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power, recently reissued in trade paperback by Random House); the inside story of a Mafia family (Honor Thy Father); the changing moral values of America between World War II and the era before AIDS (Thy Neighbor’s Wife); a historical memoir about his family’s immigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II (Unto the Sons, also recently reissued by Random House); and other books such as The Bridge, about the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows span between Brooklyn and Staten Island; New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey, a series of vignettes and essays on New York; and Fame and Obscurity, a collection of his articles principally from the pages of Esquire magazine, where he was credited by Tom Wolfe with the creation of an inventive form of nonfiction writing called “The New Journalism.”
His most recent book A Writer’s Life, is a memoir about the inner workings of a writer’s life and the interplay between experience and writing. A collection of Talese’s sports journalism (The Silent Season of a Hero) was published in September 2010.
Gay Talese lives with his wife, Nan, in New York City. He is working on a book about marriage for Knopf.